Nate Abele
Nate Abele first took an interest in programming at age 11, so you can obviously tell how cool he is. In the course of his career, he has mostly eschewed working for large companies, in favor of the culture found in small, independent businesses and startups. Nate has been employed by one of the most well-known and well-respected PHP consultancies in the world, and has worked on projects of all shapes and sizes. In other, more esoteric periods of work history, Nate has also worked with a humble ‘productivity’ software vendor in the greater Seattle area, and a small fruit vendor outside San José.
However, Nate is probably best known for his contributions to Open Source, including helping to create one of the most well-known and widely-used web frameworks for PHP. The 5 years’ experience working on a large, high-adoption project has helped to inform and guide his current crop of Open Source projects (he accidentally co-founded the Lithium framework) , writing, teaching, and consulting.
Michael Beck
Michael Beck, was born and raised in Europe, and has traveled and lived all over the world before settling down in Cincinnati, OH, where he owns a Marketing/PR company, focusing on multicultural marketing.
He is a self-confessed Open Source addict. Before moving to the PHP world, he was heavily involved in Delphi, starting the most popular Open Source component library for Delphi: the JEDI VCL. He is now an “Evangelist in Residence” at XOOPS Project, helping to coordinate it, and promoting it wherever he can.
In his other life, Michael helps the local PHP User Group, OINK-PUG, promotes STEM to local schools, and coaches kids Robotics. He has a Black Belt in Taekwondo, and won twice US Championships in full-contact sparring. In his free time or whatever is left of that, he also teaches Salsa dancing. Michael speaks English, German, Spanish, Polish, and Russian.
Keith Casey
Keith Casey has been a developer for over a decade and helps organize various tech communities. Previously, he was a professional agitator within the Washington, DC until he decided to explore Austin, TX in 2010.
To pay the bills, he works as a Developer Evangelist for Twilio to get good tools to good developers so they can build great things. Previously, he built large-scale PHP-based systems for organizations ranging from major news companies to small non-profits. In his spare time, he is a core contributor to web2project, works to build and support the Austin PHP community, co-founded the HubAustin coworking space in South Austin, blogs regularly at CaseySoftware.com and is completely fascinated by monkeys.
Adam Culp
Adam Culp (@adamculp), organizer of the South Florida PHP Users Group (SoFloPHP) where he speaks regularly, is a Zend Certified PHP 5.3 Engineer and is currently taking on consulting and development projects through his company Unique Web Sites, Inc. Adam is passionate about developing with PHP and enjoys helping others write good code, implement standards, refactor efficiently, and incorporate unit and functional tests into their projects. When he is not coding or contributing to various communities he can be found hiking around the United States National Parks, teaching judo, or participating in long distance running.
Cal Evans
Many moons ago, at the tender age of 14, Cal Evans touched his first computer. (We’re using the term “computer” loosely here, it was a TRS-80 Model 1) Since then his life has never been the same. He graduated from TRS-80s to Commodores and eventually to IBM PC’s.
For the past 13 years Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux, OSX, and Windows. He has built a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. When not banging his head on his monitor, attempting a blood sacrifice to get a particular piece of code working, he enjoys building and managing development teams using his widely imitated but never patented management style of “management by wandering around”.
These days, when not working with PHP, Cal can be found working on a variety of projects, most of which require a higher security clearance than you have so they can’t be listed here. Cal is based in Nashville TN where he is gainfully unemployed as the Chief Marketing Officer of Blue Parabola, LLC.
Cal is happily married to wife 1.28, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 wonderful kids who were both smart enough not to pursue a job in IT.
Chris Hartjes
Chris Hartjes has been building web applications of all shapes and sizes since 1998, ranging from catalogs for CD compilations for professional DJ’s to large-scale dating web sites.
A huge consumer of open-source software, Chris tries to give back to the community via his blog, by speaking at conferences, and by co-organizing the GTA PHP User Group and True North PHP conference. He is also a big believer in the power of best practices, testing, and automation as secret weapons for organizations to deliver high quality applications quickly.
He lives in Milton, Ontario, Canada with his long-suffering wife, two daughters, and two cats who do their best to ignore him during working hours.
Jeremy Kendall
Jeremy is a PHP developer, a Zend Framework expert, the organizer of Memphis PHP, a public speaker, an open source contributor, and an amateur photographer. He currently resides in his hometown of Memphis, TN
Beth Tucker Long
Elizabeth Tucker Long is the Editor-In-Chief of php|architect magazine as well as a trainer and occasional guest blogger for php|architect. She also runs Treeline Design – http://www.treelinedesign.com, a web development company, and Playlist Event Music – http://www.playlisteventmusic.com, a DJ company, along with her husband, Chris, and son, Liam.
Matthew Weier O’Phinney
Matthew is often abbreviated to “mwop” as his last name is entirely too confusing to try and write or pronounce, much less validate easily via PHP or escape properly for databases. He is a frequent speaker at PHP conferences, occasional blogger, and passionate about open source software. He hacks on Zend Framework as his day job.
You can read some of his thoughts at http://mwop.net/blog.html, at the Pastry Box, or on twitter, @weierophinney.
Joey Rivera
In working with web technologies, Joey discovered a passion for PHP. He has spent the last few years at Cengage Learning working on multiple projects and improving processes along the way. Not only does he enjoy development but he enjoys sharing as well through his blog or presenting at the local Atlanta PHP Usergroup.
When not in front of a computer you can find Joey at the gym, driving his car around the track, or helping his wife get the nursery ready for their newborn on the way.
Davey Shafik
Davey Shafik has been working with PHP and the LAMP stack, as well as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for over a decade. With several books, numerous articles and conference appearances under his belt, he enjoys teaching others any way he can. An avid photographer, he lives in sunny Florida with his wife and five cats.
Marco Tabini
Marco Tabini is Keeper of Keys and Garbage Collector Extraordinaire for Blue Parabola, LLC (php|architect’s parent company), where his job consists mainly of yelling at people over the phone (and, sometimes, over the Internet). Despite twenty years in the IT business, he still harbors the secret wish of someday becoming an internationally famous science fiction author.
David Stockton
David is the Vice President of Technology at i3Logix in Denver and President of the Front Range PHP User Group. He has been writing code in one form or another for over 24 years. He started coding in PHP in 1997 for a project for the ACM and has continued to build applications with it since. David is passionate about helping other developers improve their skills and write beautiful software.
Garrett Woodworth
Garrett Woodworth, better known as GWoo, is a passionate open source developer and community member. He earned street cred as project manager of CakePHP, where he focused on usability and development. Gwoo continues to innovate in PHP web framework space as project manager of Lithium, the most rad PHP framework. He values test-driven development and looks to promote better quality open source software through process and tooling. He likes Git, MongoDb, ZeroMQ, and Clouds. Gwoo holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Hawaii and a JD/MBA from Fordham University, where he studied intellectual property and information systems.
Sharon Levy
Sharon is a Zend Certified Engineer in PHP5, equally comfortable working with UNIX, Linux or Windows platforms. Her accomplishments in public speaking include dynamic, multi-media presentations at code camps and PHP meetups. She has also presented at SCALE (WIOS) and was the local speaker representing the Los Angeles area at the 2009 CodeWorks conference. The premier magazine php|architect has published several of her articles whose subjects range from email verification to web-based retrieval, to PHP’s support for closures. She presented a ZendCon unCon session on PHP’s anonymous functions in 2011 which resulted in Zend Technologies inviting her to do a webinar reprising that presentation in March 2012. Writing and public speaking activities compliment her primary focus, providing professional web development services for companies in diverse industries, from startups to the Fortune 500.
