Lineup
Chris Holland
Keynote Speaker
Chris leads a small Software Engineering Team at an HR company. Throughout a career spanning more than 20 years, Chris has held Sr. Engineering and Leadership roles for small and large successful publicly-traded companies such as EarthLink and Internet Brands, serving business models across Content, Commerce, Travel & Finance on a wide variety of technology stacks including PHP/LAMP, Java/J2EE and C#/.Net, catering to audiences over 100 million monthly visitors.
Sessions:
- Taming Change Keynote
Hilary Stohs-Krause
Keynote Speaker
Hilary is a full-stack software developer, currently based in Madison, WI, where she builds Rails-based web applications at Ten Forward Consulting.
She’s spoken at conferences around the country and internationally, including RailsConf 2017, SXSW 2018 and Write/Speak/Code 2018. Outside of work, she volunteers with several tech and community organizations, and co-runs Madison Women in Tech, a local group with more than 1,600 members.
Jessica Mauerhan
Keynote Speaker
Jessica is a software engineer who has been working with PHP and related technologies for over a decade. She enjoys mentoring fellow engineers in automated testing, test driven development, and quality code design. She lives in McKinney, Texas with her family and loves coffee, comedy, and podcasts.
Sessions:
- RTFM Keynote
Josh Holmes
Keynote Speaker
Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness. He is currently employed by Microsoft as the lead of the Web Apps and Frameworks team helping build a better browser for people to build apps around. Prior to joining Microsoft in October 2006, Josh was a consultant working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on web technologies on the Microsoft stack such as ASP.NET, PHP, IronRuby, JavaScript and more. Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. You can contact Josh through his blog at https://joshholmes.com.
Sessions:
Margaret Staples
Keynote Speaker
Delighted Developer Evangelist @ Twilio. Personally responsible sentient creature. Cybae. Consistent producer of code, philosophy, and attitude. Happy to help with all things Twilio. Let’s make neat stuff.
Sessions:
- I Community and So Can You Keynote
Alena Holligan
Wife, Mother, Programmer, Designer, Teacher, Leader. Bringing almost 20 years of PHP experience into her Teaching at Treehouse and leading the Portland PHP users group. She is passionate about helping people overcome their own barriers to excellence in order to achieve personal confidence in their ability to learn and succeed.
Sessions:
Andreas Hucks
Andreas Hucks works as CTO of SensioLabs Germany, where he is helping Sensio’s clients to build modern, quality web applications. His passions are clean code, testing & quality assurance, automation and application architecture. He has extensive project experience with Symfony throughout its history, doing development, consulting, coaching, and contributing to the framework.
Andrew Rota
Andrew Rota is a software engineer and engineering manager specializing in platform-level frontend user interface architecture for web applications at scale. Currently associate director in software engineering at Wayfair in Boston, MA, where he leads the Frontend Platforms team.
Sessions:
Ben Edmunds
CTO of an awesome company you’ve never heard of by day, hacking on crazy ideas by night. PHP Town Hall podcast co-host. Author of Securing PHP Apps. Conference speaker. Open source advocate.
Sessions:
Brandon Savage
In 2003 Brandon discovered that PHP could automate things that would take a long time to do by hand. Brandon was hooked, and spent every waking hour learning PHP and how to use it for his projects. Brandon began his career working for small shops doing WordPress and Drupal with some custom applications, and then moved on to Mozilla, where he worked on a highly-available big-data project called Socorro.
Brandon’s passions are object-oriented design and well-written code, along with a healthy dose of a “just ship” mentality for solving business problems. Brandon speaks at PHP conferences around the world on a variety of subjects focused on good code, object-oriented design, and getting things done.
Sessions:
Brett Florio
Full-time traveler, father, and founder + product manager at FoxyCart. When Brett isn’t busy with that stuff, you can generally find him reading about science or psychology, playing (poorly) a new musical instrument, taking macro photography of arthropods, or playing board games with his kids.
Sessions:
Daniel Cousineau
Daniel Cousineau is a founding engineer of the real-estate startup Aalto living in New York City. With a long early history in PHP and slightly-more-recent expertise in Javascript, he has over 12 years professional experience in delivering web-based software in languages the orange website loves to hate. In his laughably short free time he co-organizes the QueensJS user group and the EmpireJS conference. He enjoys short walks on the beach because walking on sand is a tough workout for your inner thighs and despite his last name not Canadian.
Sessions:
Dave Stokes
Dave Stokes is a MySQL Community Manager for Oracle and lives in Justin, Texas. Before getting into computers he had a wild series of jobs – doing unspeakable things as a mime, studying bio engineering before his home work ate his dog, and forensic proctology (a dead end job).
Sessions:
Jennifer Wadella
Jennifer Wadella has been writing code since before she realized it was a credible career path. She currently works as the lead front-end developer at a legal tech startup and loves building javascript applications + speaking at technical conferences. Jennifer is an active member of the KC tech community and the founder of Kansas City Women in Technology (KCWiT), an organization aimed at growing the number of women in technology careers in Kansas City. She is the PubConf Sydney 2018 Champion, a Silicon Prairie Champion Award Nominee, Rising Trendsetter STEMMy award-winner, and is apparently Missouri’s Coolest Woman according to Pure Wow.
Sessions:
Kat Zień
Kat works at Monzo as a backend engineer on the fincrime team. Her main interests include automating #allthethings, sorting out legacy code and making things simpler and faster. She’s co-organising and giving talks at PHPSW and London Gophers. Kat loves traveling and keeping active, appreciates good coffee and is a big Lego fan. She cycles across Europe with TechBikers to raise money for Room To Read.
Sessions:
Lawrence Shea
Lawrence is primarily a PHP Developer, with about 7 years of real world experience. Always working on the bleeding edge, with modern frameworks like Laravel. Lawrence loves to learn, motivate, teach & volunteer. He does this by co-organizing BostonPHP & Laravel Boston, by regularly attending PHP conferences, spending time helping jr. developers on (and moderating) Reddit’s /r/PHPHelp, and by speaking at conferences like Mid Atlantic Dev Con, Coder Cruise, NorthEastPHP, at the upcoming GDG Devfest, and DevOpsDays Hartford.
Sessions:
Luka Muzinic
Passionate about being a developer, teacher and mentor for newcomers into world of programming. Organiser of [@webcampzagreb](https://twitter.com/webcampzagreb) conference. Enjoys playing and watching sports that Croatians find odd and unpopular.
Sessions:
- Lua as a second language Talk
- Pragmatic TDD Tutorial
Marion Sartor
I am a software developer who began her career in the late 1980’s at Raytheon after graduating college. In 2001, I made the decision to become a stay-at-home mom for my four boys. After a dozen years, it was time for me to return, but it was during these years that the internet exploded and web development took off. I had to find a way to make myself marketable again. And I did! I now work at SoftLayer, an IBM company, and in the last five years I have transitioned from an entry level developer to a team lead for a team of 7 developers.
Sessions:
- Taking the Lead Talk
Mark Niebergall
Mark Niebergall is a security-minded PHP software engineer with over a decade of hands-on experience with PHP projects. He is the Utah PHP User Group Co-Organizer and often speaks at user groups and conferences. Mark has a Masters degree in MIS, is CSSLP and SSCP cybersecurity certified, and volunteers for (ISC)2 exam development. Mark enjoys going for long runs and teaching his five boys how to push buttons and use technology.
Sessions:
- Relational Database Design Bootcamp Tutorial
Matthew Trask
Open Source developer, cycling enthusiast, life-size ewok, hot chicken aficionado.
Sessions:
Merline Raymond
Merline Raymond thought she would be a lawyer. Now she writes code that allows hotel owners to know if their online reputation takes a nosedive. She enjoys teaching and gets kids excited about code at CodeWizardsHQ. Merline is also active in the Haitian community as the current President of Fanm Kreyol Graduate Community Chapter (FKGCC) where she leads initiatives that empower and unify Haitian women. She is currently obsessed with the Small Town Murder podcast and patiently waiting for a new Black Mirror season.
Sessions:
Omni Adams
Omni Adams has been a professional software developer for twenty years, 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.
Sessions:
Ondřej Mirtes
Ondřej works as a developer and mentor at Slevomat.cz (largest Czech Groupon-like e-commerce site offering deals to >300k daily visitors.), moving between product and software development. He enjoys quality assurance and frequent deployment of innovations for the end users. He shares his experience at conferences across Europe, offers his expertise as a consultant, and organizes trainings. He also likes pointing out mistakes in other people’s code so much that he created PHPStan, a popular static analyzer that focuses on finding bugs in code without running it.
Sessions:
Phillip Palmieri
Senior Node Engineer for Oddball, focusing on High-Availability Federal APIs for government healthcare APIs
I’ve programmed in PHP since 90’s, starting with PHP 3, and kept up to date since. I love exploring new technologies and techniques, and helping others get into software development.
Sessions:
Regine Gilbert
Regine Gilbert is a user experience designer, educator, and international public speaker with over 10 years of experience working in the technology arena. She has a strong belief in making the world a more accessible place—one that starts and ends with the user.
Regine is an Adjunct Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, teaching User Experience Design to students in the Integrated Digital Media Program. In addition, she teaches the part time User Experience Design course at General Assembly
Some of the companies Regine has had the pleasure of working for include Disney, JP Morgan, Four Seasons Hotel and Resorts, Ralph Lauren, Columbia University and Vitamin Shoppe.
Roger Creasy
Roger is a seasoned IT professional who currently works as a full-stack PHP Developer and Linux System Administrator for Container Graphics Corporation. He spends his days writing code at a standing desk and works exclusively in Linux. Previously, he worked for a media company for 15 years as a regional Digital Operations Director.
Roger is an advocate for, and a strong believer in open source. Before the days of the Internet, Roger was involved with Shareware (on floppies), and source code sharing on BBS networks. He worked on Unix systems in his college days. He was first exposed to Linux via a Sharp Zaurus, a PDA with a Linux OS. After a friend showed him how to turn the PDA into a file server, he was hooked on Linux.
Roger lives with his wife and a very hyper Border Collie in the middle of the woods on a lake in central North Carolina. When he is not at a computer he enjoys writing music and performing on trombone or guitar.
He’s visible online at RogerCreasy.com
Sammy Kaye Powers
Sammy Kaye Powers has been making things on the web for twenty years, and just got a sweet gig at Datadog helping bring APM & distributed tracing to PHP. He dabbles in PHP internals and is really good at making php-src segfault. He loves sharing knowledge about PHP internals and Facebook development at SammyK.me. He hosts the PHP Roundtable podcast and travels all over the States competing in a dance called West Coast Swing.
Sessions:
Steve Grunwell
Steve Grunwell is a Senior Software Engineer at Liquid Web, working primarily on the Managed WordPress and WooCommerce platforms. Specializing in WordPress and web application development, he has a passion for teaching and contributing back to the development community through speaking, blogging, and open-source work.
When he’s not writing tests or finding new ways to automate the world around him, Steve is off spending time with his family, enjoying a fine cup of coffee, playing guitar, or otherwise getting away from the keyboard.
Steven Wade
Steven is a Software Engineer at Follow Up Boss and has been writing PHP since 2007 – though that was not his first language (ActionScript 2.0 – 2006). Steven has a passion for community and in 2013 founded the user group UpstatePHP in Greenville, SC. In addition to organizing UpstatePHP, he has organized local hackathons, is a PHP mentor with SC Codes, and Co-Hosts the Code Talk with Matt & Steven podcast. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with his best friend/wife and their beautiful daughter.
Sessions:
Taylor Barnett
Taylor Barnett is the lead Community Engineer at Stoplight, a platform for designing, documenting, mocking, and testing web APIs. At Stoplight, she leads community and open source strategy and contributes to support, documentation, and content. She’s passionate about building great developer experiences with an emphasis on empathy and inclusion within documentation, SDKs, support, and other community-focused projects.
In her free time, she helps organize Women Who Code Austin, advises developer communities, and drinks sour beers, and climbs in Austin, Texas.
Previously, Taylor led developer community, documentation, and SDKs at Keen IO and has a background in software engineering. She has spoken about APIs, developer experience, SDKs, and building developer communities, including open source communities, at conferences such as O’Reilly OSCON, API Strategy & Practices, DevXcon, and various local meetups.
