Speakers - MidwestPHP - March 2 and 3, 2013

Who's Coming to Town

We are pleased to announce the speaker line up for this year's conference, with speakers coming from around the world and from top companies such as

USA • Belgium • Canada • England • Ireland • Spain • The Netherlands

Aaron Saray

In the late 80's, all of Aaron's friends were collecting the newest toy: Micro Machines. In his own way, Aaron was also collecting micro machines. The size of his Commodore 64 was truly micro-sized compared to computers just years earlier. And in the same way that you couldn't tear away the average 2nd grader from his toys, the computer never left Aaron's sight for very long. Fast forward more than 2 decades, and the love for programming still is strong. Aaron has worked for an insurance company, a point-of-sales company, a governor's campaign, and a printing company. All this experience has encouraged his love for developing enterprise level solutions using open source tools. As the author of Professional PHP Design Patterns (WROX), he has become an expert and a leading advocate for Design Patterns in the PHP community. Aaron blogs at aaronsaray.com where he discusses everything from HTML5, Javascript, PHP, and programmer team management.

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.

Anthony Ferrara

Anthony Ferrara is a Senior Architect for NBC Universal, specializing in Object Oriented Design, Application Architecture and Highly Scalable Web Applications. He also has experience in Web Application Security and PHP Internals. He is a contributor to multiple Open Source projects, as well as the PHP community as a whole. He is also a former Core Team Member and Development Coordinator for the Joomla! project, as well as a former leader of its Security team. You can follow his blog at blog.ircmaxell.com or on Twitter at @ircmaxell.

Bart McLeod

Bart McLeod is a painter and sculptor and spends most of his time programming in PHP and JavaScript. He currently works as a self-employed Zend Framework consultant. Bart holds four Zend Certifications: PHP 4, 5, 5.3 and ZF. He regularly contributes to Zend Framework by fixing bugs and writing about that. He blogs occasionally at spaceweb.nl and he tweets @bartmcleod. You may contact him by mail at mcleod@spaceweb.nl

Ben Edmunds

Ben Edmunds leads development teams to create cutting-edge web and mobile applications. He is an active developer, contributor, and speaker in various development communities, especially the CodeIgniter and Laravel PHP framework communities.

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. The author of "The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications", Chris tries to give back to the community via his blog, by speaking at conferences, and by co-organizing the GTA PHP User Group. 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.

Chris Tankersley

Chris Tankersley is a husband, father, and PHP developer in Northwest Ohio as well as the founder of the Northwest Ohio PHP User Group. He currently works for The Brick Factory out of Washington, D.C. and helps local developers with PHP and MySQL programming. My website is http://ctankersley.com Slides for my talks are available at http://www.slideshare.net/ctankersley

David Stokes

Dave Stokes is a MySQL Community Manager for Oracle. Previously he was the MySQL Certification Manager for MySQL AB & Sun. He has worked for companies ranging alphabetically from the American Heart Association to Xerox. Dave has a MBA from the University of San Diego and lives in Texas.

Helgi Thorbjoernsson

I am an Icelander transplanted in Ireland that co-founded Orchestra.io, a PHP PaaS - Currently I work as an engineer at Engineyard. In my spare time I am a PEAR extraordinaire, author, lecturer and passionate about anything distributed / performance related.

Jason Rhodes

I'm a PHP and JavaScript developer at Johns Hopkins University and I'm on a journey from self-taught WordPress hacker to world-changing polylingual programmer. I also spend too much time keeping my fridge full of snooty beer and teaching my 2 year old son to ignore the Star Wars prequels.

Jeff Carouth

Jeff Carouth is a web application developer honing his programming and skiing skills at Liftopia. He is an active member of the PHP community, speaker, and co-organizer of BCSPHP. He believes quality code, testing, and automation are necessary ingredients in a recipe for a successful software project. When not hacking away at code he is a father and husband, beer and Scotch enthusiast, and an amateur photographer.

Jeremy Mikola

Jeremy Mikola is a software engineer at 10gen's NYC office. As a member of the driver and evangelism team, he helps develop the PHP driver and contributes to various OSS projects, such as Doctrine MongoDB ODM, Symfony2 and Zend Framework. Before joining 10gen in May 2012, Jeremy worked with MongoDB for a few years at OpenSky and Exercise.com.

Jérôme Petazzoni

Jérôme is a senior engineer at dotCloud, where he rotates between Ops, Support and Evangelist duties and the nickname of "master Yoda", has earned. In a previous life he built and operated large scale Xen hosting back when EC2 was just the name of a plane, supervized the deployment of fiber interconnects through the French subway, built a specialized GIS to visualize fiber infrastructure, specialized in commando deployments of large-scale computer systems in bandwidth-constrained environments such as conference centers, and various other feats of technical wizardry. He cares for the servers powering dotCloud, helps our users feel at home on the platform, and documents the many ways to use dotCloud in articles, tutorials and sample applications. He's also an avid dotCloud power user who has deployed just about anything on dotCloud - look for one of his many custom services on our Github repository. Connect with Jérôme on Twitter! @jpetazzo

Jesse Donat

I am a Minnesota Based PHP Developer for Capstone Digital. Developing PHP professionally for the last seven years, I have worked on a wide variety of projects including e-commerce, industrial, as well as educational.

Joel Clermont

PHP, Ruby and C# developer living in the Milwaukee area. Organizer of Milwaukee PHP user group. Addicted to learning, teaching and growing the developer community.

Jonathan LeBlanc

Jonathan LeBlanc is an Emmy award winning software engineer, author of the O’Reilly book "Programming Social Applications", and principal developer evangelist for North America at PayPal. Specializing in user identity concepts and data mining techniques, as well as open source initiatives around social engagement, Jonathan works on the development of emerging initiatives towards building a more user-centric web.

Josh Broton

Josh is the Interactive Design Lead and front-end developer at VistaComm in Sioux Falls, SD. He has a passion for making things both beautiful and usable. At any given time, you’ll find him tinkering with JavaScript and responsive web development, finishing his Computer Science/Network Security degrees, Twitter-ranting at @joshbroton and speaking at various conferences.

Ken Harris

Ken has an MSCS degree from UW Milwaukee. He has been a teacher, consultant, engineer and entrepeneur. He has been working with Internet and web technologies since he got his first Sparc Station 20 years ago. His current work involves writing web services for embedded energy management systems at Telkonet, Inc.

Michael Pavlak

Mike Pavlak has been working with IBM midrange solutions since 1992 and IBM Mainframes before that. After years of developing applications using RPG, CL and PHP he managed IT development and IT for power protection manufacturer Tripp Lite. Mike joined Zend Technologies as a Solutions Consultant working with the IBM sales team in 2008 and enjoys helping IBM i customers explore PHP as a state of the art solution for application modernization. In addition to several roles as a volunteer with COMMON the premier IBM midrange user group, Mike also teaches PHP classes part time at Moraine Valley Community College in Suburban Chicago.

Mike Stowe

Mike is a professional software engineer, PHP 5.3 Zend Certified, and has over 10 years of PHP hacking experience. In those 10 years he as had the privilege of building numerous websites and applications, including applications for the medical field, law enforcement, one of the leading audio and lighting dealers, large and small non-profits, and numerous industrial companies. He has also spoken at numerous conferences, published multiple articles on PHP and security, is an active member of OWASP, and helps organize MNPHP, Twin Cities Software Engineers, and the MidwestPHP Conference. He currently work at CaringBridge as a Software Engineer, where they serve half a million people everyday.

Omni Adams

Omni Adams has been a professional web developer for over a decade, primarily using PHP and MySQL. When not playing hockey or brewing beer, he barks at coworkers about their lack of unit tests and automates all of the boring things in his job.

Pablo Godel

Pablo Godel is co-founder of ServerGrove Networks. He has been involved with PHP since the early PHP3Beta days and has been using Symfony for several large projects. In his leisure time he likes to spend his time with his family, travel and sailing.

RAUL FRAILE

Freelance PHP/Symfony2 web developer and trainer. Symfony Certified Developer and PHP 5.3 Zend Certified Engineer. LadybugPHP component creator.

Sara Golemon

Sara is a long-time contributor to PHP and author of "Extending and Embedding PHP". Currently, she is the OSS coordinator of, and a contributor to, the HipHop for PHP project.

Scott Mattocks

Scott Mattocks is the Director of Development at GSN Digital. He leads a team of highly skilled developers, driving growth and scale of GSN's on-line games platforms. Scott lives in Massachusetts with his wife and four kids.

Steve Meyers

Steve Meyers has worked as a PHP and MySQL scalability expert for the last 14 years at such companies as Omniture (now part of Adobe), Spark Networks (owner of jDate.com), and CrimeReports. He now runs one of the largest independent online communities of college sports fans.

Wim Godden

Wim Godden has been working with PHP since 1997 and has been involved in open source projects such as phpAdsNew/OpenX. Next to PHP, he's worked with a wide range of technologies (from database clusters to Internet backbone design) and focuses a lot of his time on high-scalability projects and on coaching/training PHP engineers.