Speakers
Keynote Speaker
Rodney Urquhart (@RodneyU215) (View Talk)
Rodney Urquhart is a senior software engineer at Slack, one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. His story demonstrates what perseverance, determination, and a little bit of luck can turn into.Being a high school dropout and having no college degree, Rodney had his fair share of companies casting doubt on his ability. But his willingness to learn and work well with others was what got him to create an impressive company portfolio including Comcast, Microsoft, and ThoughtWorks.
He didn’t just want to survive, he learned how to thrive. Rodney is currently one of the leaders for the test infrastructure team at Slack. He is also part of a program called /dev/color, a non-profit organization that aims to maximize the impact of Black software engineers in the tech space.
Keynote Speaker
Michelangelo van Dam (@DragonBe) (View Talk)
Michelangelo is a veteran PHP consultant working at in2it, community leader for PHPBenelux, coach and mentor for kids at CoderDojo and a global conference speaker. Get him a coffee and he will tell you all about testing, continuous deployments, cloud or community work.Tutorial Speaker
Jordan Kasper (@jakerella) (View Talk)
Shortly after it arrived at his home in 1993, Jordan began disassembling his first computer - his mother was not happy. She breathed more easily when he moved from hardware into programming. Jordan's experience includes development and instruction at startups, agencies, Fortune 100 companies, and universities, as well as numerous open source projects. His programming experience includes JavaScript (and Node.js), PHP, Java, Natural, Perl, and more. He speaks regularly at (and helps organize) local user groups and conferences big and small. Jordan's primary mission for over 10 years has been to evangelize technology of all sorts and share what he has learned to help others grow. In his down time, he enjoys puzzles of all sorts and board games!Tutorial Speaker
Ken Marks (@FlibertiGiblets) (View Talk)
Ken is an IT Programming Instructor at Madison Area Technical College. He teaches intro and advanced programming in JavaScript, Java, and PHP. In a previous life Ken spent a big chunk of his career developing medical device software in C and C++. When Ken is not teaching he enjoys spending time with his family, and roasting his own coffee beans.Tutorial Speaker
Andrea Skeries (@Artistic_Abode) (View Talk)
My mission is to bring awareness to designers, developers, and content writers that the work they do has a direct impact on people's lives. For more than a decade I've worked with healthcare, hospitality, restaurants, non-profits, educational, and governmental organizations to provide accessible user experiences for their site visitors. As a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) through the IAAP, I educate the community with interactive training and building empathy in workshops and meetups.Tutorial Speaker
Chris Tankersley (@dragonmantank) (View Talk)
Chris Tankersley is a husband, father, author, speaker, PHP developer, podcast host, and probably lots of other things he's forgetting to mention. He works for InQuest, a network security company out of Washington, DC, but lives in Northwest Ohio where it is much colder sometimes. Chris has worked with many different frameworks and languages throughout his twelve years of programming, but spends most of his day working in PHP, with a sprinkling of Python thrown in for good measure. He is the author of "Docker for Developers"Tutorial Speaker
Christian Varela (@gabriel0702) (View Talk)
Husband, Father of 3 girls. He is PHP programmer with 13 years of experience. He started working with PHP to create web applications. He's originally from Mexico and he has lived in Miami for 8 years. He created his own company Conqueror Soft. Currently he works for both his company and CVS Health. He is the lead PHP programmer at CVS. He likes to play piano and guitar.Tutorial Speaker
Liam Wiltshire (@l_wiltshire) (View Talk)
Liam is a UK based Senior PHP Developer & Business Manager at Tebex, creators of Buycraft.net, the first e-commerce platform for Minecraft. In his nine years as a dev, he's tackled projects large and small, from multi-million pound eCommerce sites to the plumber down the road looking for 'mates' rates. These days Liam focuses on providing gCommerce platforms for multiplayer sandbox games, and in his spare time is trying to learn the secret to actually having some spare time.Speaker
Edward Barnard (@ewbarnard) (View Talk)
Ed Barnard had a front-row seat when the Morris Worm took down the Internet, November 1988. He was teaching CRAY-1 supercomputer operating system internals to analysts as they were being directly hit by the Worm. It was a busy week! Ed continues to indulge his interests in computer security and teaching software concepts to others.Speaker
Derek Binkley (@DerekB_WI) (View Talk)
Derek is the Technical Lead at the National Conference of Bar Examiners, the creator of licensing exams for attorneys. He actively mentors other developers, specializes in Java, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL and Oracle and advocates for developer testing and adoption of agile methods. When not in front of a computer he enjoys spending time with family, traveling and drinking a local craft beer.Speaker
Philippe Gamache (@philoupedia) (View Talk)
Philippe Gamache contributes to PHP since 1999: promotion, participation at local user groups, organizing conferences, speaking at conferences and writing technical articles. He works especially with Symfony, specializing in security, code quality, and performance. Co-author of a PHP security book called "Sécurité PHP 5 et MySQL". He was a member of the executive board of Montreal's OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) group for several years. Now a big part of his work is to help the PHP community to adopt new tools like kuzzle to add a real-time engine, subscription and notification mechanisms, geolocation/geofencing, advanced search features and more protocols to their applications.Speaker
Daniel Greig (View Talk)
Daniel Greig is a team and technical lead at Earthling Interactive. He has worked in a variety of languages and systems over the last 15 years.Speaker
Julka Grodel (@jgrodel) (View Talk)
Julka Grodel is a Principal Software Engineer at Framebridge, a DC startup disrupting the custom framing market. She is passionate about writing easily maintainable and extendable code and has worked professionally in web development for over a decade. When not working on code empowering Framebridge customers to frame everything they love, she spends her time volunteering on literacy projects with the Junior League, in a pilates studio, or doting over her blind cat Batman and his BFF Robin.Speaker
Nara Kasbergen (@xiehan) (View Talk)
Nara Kasbergen is a full-stack developer in NPR (National Public Radio)'s Digital Media group, where she's worked on a variety of projects, most notably the third-party developer platform for NPR One. She recently joined the tech conference speaking circuit because of her interest in Developer Experience (DX), community-building, the intersection of humans and code, and her volunteer work for Open Sourcing Mental Illness, a non-profit organization raising awareness about mental health in the tech industry. Though she has no noticeable accent, she hails from The Netherlands and lived in Munich, Houston, Pittsburgh, Tokyo, and New York City prior to settling down in Washington, DC. In her spare time, she satisfies her foodie habits by trying out all of the best restaurants in the city, collects board games, and watches too much Netflix.Speaker
Vesna Kovach (@vesna_v_k) (View Talk)
Vesna Kovach is part of the small, passionate, agile development team at OfficeSupply.com near Madison, Wisconsin. She runs DevDivas.com, a site that celebrates the history of women in technology, and tweets at @dev_divas.Speaker
Oscar Merida (@omerida) (View Talk)
Oscar still remembers downloading an early version of the Apache HTTP server at the end of 1995, and promptly asking "Ok, what's this good for?" He started learning PHP in 2000 and hasn't stopped since. He's worked with Drupal, WordPress, Zend Framework, Silex, and bespoke PHP, to name a few. Currently, he's the Editor-in-chief at php[architect], a monthly magazine for PHP programmers.Speaker
Stefany Newman (View Talk)
I am a programmer and a freelance web developer. In my spare time I love to read history, ride bikes, and play Go. I also love programming. I think it is the best thing in the world to do and to be. I love the freedom that being a programmer gives me. I live by the maxim "If you stop being better, you stop being good" so I try to better myself every day, in the programming field. I live in Arkansas with my lovely husband whom I like to annoy with constant web development chatter (he isn't annoyed, he just doesn't understand). My personal website is www.StefanyNewman.info.Speaker
Andrea Roenning (@andreaincode) (View Talk)
Andrea Roenning is a Web Developer and Designer at Forte Research Systems in Madison, WI where she develops and manages several WordPress sites. After studying to be a journalist in college, Andrea started building websites in 2001. She became a full stack developer out of necessity as problems needed to be solved, thanks largely to the support of the web community. When she's not writing code, Andrea is probably outside, cross country skiing, hiking, cycling or running with her three-legged labrador. To learn more, visit http://andrearoenning.comSpeaker
Patrick Schwisow (@PSchwisow) (View Talk)
Patrick has been into web technologies since the "bad old days" when animated GIFs were required on all sites and the BLINK tag still had some supporters. He suffered through several years of procedural programming in PHP4 before discovering the glories of OOP in PHP5. Patrick is a Software Engineer at Shutterstock, with experience in Doctrine, Symfony, and several less fun technologies. After hours, he works on supporting the PHP Community and contributing to the Phergie IRC Bot.Speaker
Emily Stamey (@elstamey) (View Talk)
Emily Stamey works at InQuest, a network security company based in Washington, DC. She learned PHP in 1999 and loved it. This ignited her passion for Open Source! In her free time she enjoys music, legos, making things, playing games, and socializing. She is an active volunteer in the community as Director of Women Who Code Raleigh/Durham, Organizer of TrianglePHP, and volunteers for Girl Develop It. She enjoys helping people share ideas and learn together, which has led to her speaking at conferences.Speaker
Matthew Turland (@elazar) (View Talk)
Matthew Turland has been working with PHP since 2002. He has been both an author and technical editor for php|architect Magazine, spoken at multiple conferences, and contributed to numerous PHP projects. He holds the PHP 5 and Zend Framework ZCE certifications and is the author of "php|architect's Guide to Web Scraping with PHP" and co-author of SitePoint's "PHP Master: Write Cutting-Edge Code." In his spare time, he likes to bend PHP to his will to scrape web pages and run IRC bots.Speaker
Michelangelo van Dam (@DragonBe) (View Talk)
Michelangelo is a veteran PHP consultant working at in2it, community leader for PHPBenelux, coach and mentor for kids at CoderDojo and a global conference speaker. Get him a coffee and he will tell you all about testing, continuous deployments, cloud or community work.Speaker