2021 Speakers.
Join 36 great speakers this year. Subject to change.
Adewale Abati Flutterwave
Adewale Abati, also known as Ace is a Frontend Engineer and Developer Advocate at Flutterwave - a global online payments gateway company out of Lagos, Nigeria. Ace is passionate about the web, open source and the developer community. An avid gamer who also shares his developer experiences through his social media, technical writing, public speaking and YouTube.Talks:
‐ Building for the world from Nigeria with Open Source
Alena Holligan BRIGHT.MD
Wife, Mother, Programmer, Designer, Teacher, Leader. Passionate about helping developers to be successful in both their careers and their parenting by giving them the tools and mindset to overcome their own barriers to excellence and achieve personal confidence in their ability to learn and succeed.Talks:
‐ PHP Resources‐ PHP Frameworks
‐ Data, files, sessions, & forms
‐ Errors, Exceptions, & Logging
‐ Database Basics
‐ Testing in PHP
‐ Using Composer
‐ Object Oriented Programming (Part 2)
‐ Object Oriented Programming (Part 1)
‐ Language Fundamentals
‐ Getting Setup with PHP
Anton Titov Spiral Scout
CTO of Spiral ScoutTalks:
‐ RoadRunner - high-performance PHP application server
Ayesh Karunaratne PHP.Watch
Ayesh Karunaratne is the author of PHP.Watch (https://php.watch), where he provides in-depth articles and documents on PHP and latest changes to the language.Talks:
‐ PHP Enums
Ben Edmunds Wayfair
Forcing PHP to be web scale by day, hacking on fun ideas by night. PHP Town Hall podcast co-host. Author of Securing PHP Apps. Open source advocate.Talks:
‐ Getting Started with Algorithms and Data Structures
Benjamin Fistein
Having worked at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle, Ben has co-founded the Prague-based software development company iolevel in 2017. The company maintains and develops PeachPie, the PHP compiler to .NET.Talks:
‐ Running PHP apps on .NET 5
Camilo Payan Test Double
Camilo rose from the swamps of South Florida, where he taught the alligators PHP and Vim. He traveled the Sahara with the Tuaregs of Morocco, and found the SOLID design principles etched into glass beneath the sands. He then moved from Miami to Chattanooga, to teach what he could, and receive the wisdom of the ascetic programmers of Appalachia. Returned to his home, he now maintains a code garden in the algorithmic center of the Everglades. Whether or not Camilo received a Computer Science degree from Florida International University remains a hotly contested debate among his biographers, critics, and acolytes.Talks:
‐ The Fault In Our Code: Debugging Methods For Every Stage
Dan Johansson Travelnet Solutions
Dan Johansson has been a professional software engineer for 17 years with a focus in web applications. Dan has worked on applications in hospitality, call center, recruitment, and building automation industries. Currently, Dan is a principal architect at TravelNet Solutions and occasional contributor to open source PHP projects.Talks:
‐ Architecture Roundtable‐ CI/CD with Github Actions
Danielle KAYUMBI DK WAVE TECHNOLOGY
Graduated from the Sup Galilée School of Engineering in Software Engineering in 2010, and mother of 3 boys including a pair of twins, I am passionate about web technologies, including PHP language, the Symfony Framework. For 4 years I have been freelance in web development PHP 7 / Symfony 4, in parallel with my activity as General Manager of my own company, DK Wave Technology. Today I am preparing myself to pass a PHP certification and I wish to bring new ideas into the PHP community. I also had the privilege of sharing my experiences during two conferences in France: Symfony Live Paris 2019 and PHP Tour Nantes 2017. Besides development, I also love martial arts (Taekwondo) and baking from every angle.Talks:
‐ Inter microservice Communication with gRPC
Dave Stokes Oracle
Dave Stokes is a MySQL Community Manager for Oracle and the author of MySQL & JSON - A Practical Programming GuideTalks:
‐ MySQL 8.0 New Features
Deyan Yanakiev Siteground
Deyan is a front-end developer for over half a decade now. Deyan started with Vanilla JavaScript, added a pinch of AngularJS, a grain of WordPress development and topped it all off with a bit of ReactJS.Talks:
‐ Build and validate React forms with back-end Symfony configuration
Dr. Shallon Elizabeth Brown North Studio
Dr. Shallon Elizabeth Brown has been in software engineering for over 20 years and specifically worked in Drupal since 2007 on Drupal Core 5. She recently completed her Doctorate in Information Systems Engineering, where she graduated at the top of her class with a 4.0 GPA as the first African American woman in the world to publish a manuscript on open source technology. Her manuscript was titled “Motivations in Open Source: A Quantitative Study on Drupal in Academia” which was the first doctoral manuscript in the world to ever be published on Drupal at the time of publication. She was chosen as the Keynote Speaker for Baltimore’s 2017 Drupalcon Higher Education Summit where she got to present the findings of her work. She has developed hundreds of Drupal websites for major organizations, such as Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine Cardiovascular Research, the IRS, Columbia University, the Centers or Medicare and Medicaid, Fluke, and Expedia. As an API integration and build migration specialist, She has a passion for mentorship in engineering and loves working with other developers to expand into new toolsets for web development. She has most recently begun working to obtain AWS cloud certifications as well as developing more full-stack PHP applications with Laravel, React Native and Django. In addition, Dr. Brown’s doctoral specialization is Adult IT Education where she specifically wrote about pedagogy in Information Technology and theories on how adults process and respond to web applications.Talks:
‐ Dropping Like Flies: Turnover in the Software Development Industry
Ed Barnard USA Clay Target League
Ed has experienced two 20-year careers in software development. He soldered together his first computer from a handful of resistors, diodes, switches, and lights in 1968 at age 10. He taught himself FORTRAN IV two years later. High School brought BASIC. College introduced Algol, assembly language, and Pascal. Ed's first career was writing operating system software for Cray Research and the world's fastest computers. His second career has been web software development for countless clients, companies, and projects. Ed and wife Susan have a new hobby: camping the Minnesota winter, allowing them to get back outdoors with no mosquitoes.Talks:
‐ Keynote: Here Be Dragons: Finding the Joy in Software Development‐ PHP Resources
‐ PHP Frameworks
‐ Data, files, sessions, & forms
‐ Errors, Exceptions, & Logging
‐ Database Basics
‐ Testing in PHP
‐ Using Composer
‐ Object Oriented Programming (Part 2)
‐ Object Oriented Programming (Part 1)
‐ Language Fundamentals
‐ Getting Setup with PHP
Eric Mann
Eric is a web developer, technical leader, and polyglot with over a decade of experience working with companies and projects big and small. He's been working with PHP through his entire career, both professionally and recreationally. Today, Eric focuses his time on helping developers get started with and level up their skills with their technology of choice.Talks:
‐ WordPress, meet AI‐ OWASP Top Ten in Review
Florian Engelhardt OXID eSales AG
Proud dad of five kids, husband, Linux and #Vim user, #PHP dev, software architect, technical consultant, geek and I'm getting shit doneTalks:
‐ Asynchronous PHP
Guillermo Fisher
Guillermo is a Cloud Enablement Leader at Cloudreach who leads a team of data scientists, data architects, and data engineers. He is also the founder of 757ColorCoded, an organization focussed on helping people of color achieve careers in technology. He's a husband, father of four, fan of clean code, and a consumer of very silly comedy.Talks:
‐ ElePHPants in the Sky
Idelin Todorov SiteGround
Idelin is a Software Development Team Lead at SiteGround. With a background as a backend developer, his largest and most complicated project so far is the API, driving the brand spanking new SiteGround Users’ Area. Idelin is passionate about programming and technologies from programming micro controllers to the architecture of vast web applications hundreds of thousands of users.Talks:
‐ Build and validate React forms with back-end Symfony configuration
Joe Karlsson MongoDB
Joe Karlsson is a software engineer turned Developer Advocate at MongoDB. He comes from the frozen tundra of Minneapolis, Minnesota (and yes, it does get really cold here, and no, not everyone here has the accent from the movie, Fargo 😝). Joe has been primarily a Node and JavaScript engineer. He has been writing, teaching, and talking about code his entire career. Sharing what he knows and continuing to learn about programming is truly the thing he loves doing the most. Joe is the co-creator of open source software, including bechdel.io, a web app that tells you if a movie script passes the Bechdel Test or not. In his free time, he is usually drinking Gin and Tonics, eating at a new restaurant, or tinkering on a new art project or open source project.Talks:
‐ Save The World And Money with Data Lake's
Larry Garfield Platform.sh
Larry Garfield is an aspiring blacksmith who moonlights as Director of Developer Experience for Platform.sh. When not trying to hand-forge his own medieval armory from scratch he tries to teach developers and development managers the skills of yesteryear that the industry has forgotten.Talks:
‐ PSR-14: A major PHP Event‐ Exploring PHP 8.0
Mario Blažek Q Agency
Mario Blažek is a Senior Backend Developer at Q Agency. Most of the time uses PHP as a language of choice. He promotes open-source software and PHP related technologies as one of the organizers of Zagreb PHP User Group (ZgPHP). Likes working with Symfony framework and explores the dark sides of it. He is a Symfony and Twig certified developer. When is not on the primary job, he volunteers as a Chief fire officer at the local fire department. Is married to a beautiful wife and is a father of two sons.Talks:
‐ Living with open source responsibility
Mert Simsek Beyn
I’m a software developer who wants to learn more. First of all, I improve in the Design Patterns and SOLID principles and 12-Factor App manifesto as much as I can. I’m interested in building, testing and deploying automatically and autonomous. I’ve been writing blog posts about software development and in this way, I’ve been getting my motivation from the community. Also, I’ve been talking and giving some speeches about my knowledge in some conferences and meetups. I believe in contributing power, therefore I contribute open-source projects as long as I can do.Talks:
‐ 12-Factor App Manifesto
Mike Stowe RingCentral
Michael Stowe is a professional, Zend Certified Engineer with over 10 years experience building applications for law enforcement, the medical field, nonprofits, and numerous industrial companies. Over the last several years he has been focused on APIs and ways to improve industry standards and efficiency. He now works for RingCentral, a company on the leading edge of cloud communications. You can view slides from his other talks at mikestowe.com/slides or follow him: @mikegstoweTalks:
‐ Enterprise Technology Q&A‐ The Power of Code and Community
Milko Kosturkov Ty's Software
I’ve been a professional developer for more than 14 years, but actually started to play with programming about 21 years ago. I’ve worked on many and diverse projects, including TV productions, SMS and Voice added services, MMO games, freelancing, SEO aiding projects, healthcare, etc. Keen on writing clean, expressive working code. When programming I mostly enjoy designing the overall architecture of the system and digging deeply into the domain of the problem at hand. On the non-technical side - I started my own company two years ago and organized Bulgaria PHP Conference 2019. Also, I am a wannabe rock-star - like in singing in bands and stuff...Talks:
‐ Minimize the framework and allow yourself some DDD‐ GUI Architectures: History, Present, the Web
Oliver Davies Inviqa
Oliver Davies (@opdavies) has been building websites since 2007, and speaking at meetups and conferences since 2012. He is a Full Stack Developer and an Acquia certified Drupal Grand Master, who also has experience developing with Symfony, Laravel, Sculpin and Vue.js, as well as with DevOps and systems administration. He is a Senior Software Engineer at Inviqa, a Drupal core contributor and mentor, and an open source and contribution advocate. He regularly blogs and gives talks on various topics, maintains and contributes to various open source projects, and organises the PHP South Wales user group.Talks:
‐ Deploying PHP applications with Ansible, Ansible Vault and Ansistrano‐ Upgrading your site to Drupal 9
Olivia Liddell
Olivia Liddell is a Technical Curriculum Developer at Amazon Web Services. Over the course of her career, she has created innovative teaching and technical training solutions for learners from diverse backgrounds and skill levels. A Certified Ethical Hacker, Olivia frequently speaks on topics such as social engineering and security awareness. In her spare time, she enjoys distance running, studying linguistic anthropology, and developing web applications for Arabic language learners.Talks:
‐ Socially Engineering Your Pathway to a Better Team
Omni Adams Givelify
Omni Adams has been a professional software developer for twenty years, primarily using PHP, though he's branched out to know enough Go, Python, and Javascript to break things. 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.Talks:
‐ Break Off a Piece of That Monolith
Patrick Schwisow Moonrise
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, survived the tabs-spaces war, and has come to love code standards and peer code reviews. Patrick is a Senior Software Engineer at Moonrise.Talks:
‐ Achieving High-Quality Code Standards
Scott Keck-Warren WeCare
Scott Keck-Warren (@scottkeckwarren) is a father of two, a partner to Stephanie, Directory of Technology at WeCare Connect, and blogger at @thisprogramming. Scott has been working professionally as a PHP developer for over a decade. He currently manages a team that focuses on developing PHP based solutions to better help their customers.Talks:
‐ Getting Started with Test-Driven Development
Sean Keegan Postman
Sean is a Developer Advocate for Postman, Collaboration Platform for API Development used by 12M+ developers and 500K companies to access tons of APIs every month. Sean loves video games and ultimate frisbee, and has a newfound passion for houseplants.Talks:
‐ 10 ways to Level Up with Postman
Tanja Hoefler RingCentral
Tanja is a firm believer in community, volunteering to help numerous developer community events including hackathons, conferences, and meet ups. Her passion goes beyond tech and events into helping others learn, even putting in 9 months as a research assistant to help kids in third world countries read.Talks:
‐ Welcome and community
Teresa Porter
I'm Teresa Porter from Cary, NC. I'm a million-dollar grossing photographer, a TEDX Speaker, a Huffington Post published author, a part-time comedienne, and mom. I'm the one who always sat with the new kid in school, rocked an orange safety vest on safety patrol, and cried along with anyone who had their feelings hurt. Now all that making people laugh, building quick rapport, and looking to the sky for creative inspiration mix together for a perfect combination. A little therapy for when you're feeling vulnerable. A little humore to remind you it's not that serious. A little safety-patrol-nerd-anxiety for understanding the things that hold us back. Tears of joy to share with you when it all comes togeher and you feel understood, entertained, and encouraged.Talks:
‐ Worst Makes Best: From Crash to Comeback
Tim Riggs LeanCor
I have been playing in the web development world for about 10 years. Have worked in the web application industry for the past 8 years, and have been a software developer about 5 of that. I enjoy solving problems and teaching others better ways to handle things. I tend to focus on clean code, performance, and security.Talks:
‐ Clean Code - Developing SOLID web applications
Tracy Boggiano
Tracy Boggiano is currently a Data Platform MVP, PASSion 2020 Award winner, and works as a Senior Database Administrator for DocuSign. She is currently a co-leader of the Triangle SQL Server User Group in Raleigh, NC and Data Platform Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Virtual Group. Her passion outside of SQL Server is volunteering by advocating for abused and neglected foster children in court through the North Carolina Guardian ad Litem program. This is her favorite and most important job. She has been an Guardian ad Litem for 18+ years and advocated for over 50+ children. As someone who experienced mental health issues she has for the past two years started being a mental health advocate by being a part of the PAIMI (Protection and Advocacy of Individuals with Mental Illnesses) Advisory Council with the DRNC (Disability Rights of North Carolina).Talks:
‐ Mental Health and Wellness in IT: Safeguarding our most precious resource
Vinícius Campitelli
I've been using PHP for over 10 years now and have closely followed the language improvement since then, using it on several projects, even in daemons and background processes. I like to talk about good coding practices, systems architecture and cybersecurity.Talks:
‐ libsodium: the modern cryptographic library for PHP 7‐ Real software security with PHP
