About

PHP UK Conference 2012 is PHP London's seventh annual conference. More information about the previous six events can be found on their archived websites:

PHP UK Conferences are held annually at the end of February each year, in the capital city of London. Attended by hundreds of delegates, speakers, sponsors, partners and volunteer assistants, they are run by volunteers from the PHP community and elected committee members of PHP London. Delegates are typically professional web developers and managers, along with some general PHP enthusiasts/evangelists and employment recruiters.

The events are a mix of split-track talk sessions, keynote presentations, panel sessions and unconference slots, along with space for exhibitors, various networking and social events, and a raffle. Costs are kept low and any profit made is used to fund PHP London throughout the rest of the year and/or is rolled into funding future conferences.

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It is one of the first developed server-side scripting languages to be embedded into an HTML source document, rather than calling an external file to process data. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and also as a standalone shell on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is estimated to be installed on more than 75% of all websites.

PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. The main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the formal reference to the PHP language. PHP is free software released under the PHP License, and while it originally stood for 'Personal Home Page', it is now said to stand for 'PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor', a recursive acronym.

The PHP UK Conference 2012 is powered by PHP London, a limited company of the UK. The conference planning committee is made of up the PHP London executive committee and additional volunteer members:

Ciarán Rooney

Ciáran Rooney

Ciarán is the CTO of Skimlinks where he leads the technical innovation for Skimlinks' products and the platform's infrastructure. Before joining Skimlinks, Ciarán worked in Ireland as Head of IT at one of the country's largest mobile communications companies. He also worked as a freelance developer before establishing Weeno Ltd, a web application and design company. Ciaran has been developing PHP applications at large scale for the past 10 years since he first studied Digital Media Engineering in Dublin City University. He also holds a Honors Diploma in Multimedia awarded by University of West London (formally Thames Valley University). Ciaran can be found on Twitter at @CiaranR

Ciarán is currently the President of PHP London and has also been a regular attendee for a number of years. Ciarán is this year's PHP UK Conference committees Chairperson.

Dave Nattriss

Dave has been building, maintaining and contributing towards media and entertainment-related websites and applications since 1996, covering popular musical artists/bands and publications, television shows, presenters and actors, online merchandise stores and fashion designers, journalists, magazines and newspapers. He first started using PHP in 2000, the year that he graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, and has since lived in London for nearly 10 years. He has worked freelance throughout that time, now within his own web development company, and regularly posts 'stuff' he finds on the web via Facebook, Twitter and on his tumblr blog.

He has been attending PHP London meetings since 2006 and volunteered himself to be their webmaster in early 2007, holding the position in his fifth year now. A year later he also took on the role as mailmaster and is effectively responsible for the organisation's growing amount of branding and PR. He has similar roles for the organisation of the conference, having been involved since the 2009 event - putting together and maintaining this website, liaising with community and media partners, running and supporting the registration system and sorting out delegate badges and bags for the event. He is also the secretary for one of the conference's community partners, Facebook Developer Garage London.

Sam Bell

Sam is Creative Director at Ideal Websites, a web agency specialising in PHP-driven websites and trading applications for hedge funds and financial services companies. Sam and his business partner founded Ideal Websites in 2005 and now focus mainly on their lead product Copia CMS, their content management system for fund managers (built using PHP and the Zend Framework).

Sam has been a regular attendee of PHP London for a number of years and is now the PHP London secretary, and is also responsible for organising the PHP UK Conference sponsorship.

Betty Tran

Betty graduated with a master's degree in Computer Science from the University of London, specialising in information retrieval and web technologies in 2009. Since then, she has been developing websites using PHP and Drupal in the publishing and film industries. She enjoys building iOS and Android applications as a hobby and in the past year has worked on CMS integrated mobile applications for various tourism firms.

Betty is a regular attendee of PHP London and holds the PHP London Auditor role in addition to being on the PHP UK Conference committee.

Franck Cassedanne

Franck is the CTO of Info.com (a search engine company based in London and Chicago) where he leads its technical operations and directions. He is heavily involved in back-end and front-end developments on a daily basis and he is a skilled system administrator.

Franck has been developing in PHP since 1998 and he is the founder of OUARZ Technology Ltd, a one-stop-shop PHP-based site building and hosting platform. He holds the Zend Certified Engineer qualification in PHP5 development.

He has been a regular of PHP London since 2006 and, for a few years, was on its executive committee. He also help organise the conferences since 2009. Franck can be found on Twitter at @kifranky

Abigail E.

Aby is a Senior Web Developer leading the Operations team at The Book Depository. She has been working with PHP on large scale websites since 2000, doing occasional freelancing and small personal projects on the way.

A self-proclaimed geek, she developed a passion for programming and technology at the very early age of 7, which carries on until the present days. She has learned several languages over the years, although PHP has taken most of her professional time and is still one of her favourites. She studied Computer Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and later the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and is still studying and keeping up with the latest news and trends around the programming world.

Originally from sunny Barcelona, Spain, on 2011 she decided to move to the United Kingdom for a change of pace and new challenges. Since then she has been a regular at the PHP London meetups, where she enjoys the talks and conversations with fellow developers.

Richard Johnson

Previously working as Lead Developer for several years at Brightlabs, a leading Australian web agency, Richard now finds himself Team Lead at Skimlinks. Richard has experience in a wide range of tech and is just as comfortable debugging browser rendering quirks as he is wiring up new servers in the data centre. He passes the time writing open source file parsing libraries, experimenting with new languages and reading books on cryptography.

Richard has been developing with PHP since 2000 and is now a regular attendee of PHP London.

John Le Drew

John has been a regular attendee of PHP London for a number of years and is currently contracting in London where he is working in development, consultancy and training as antz29 Ltd. Before starting up on his own (and moving back to his home town) John worked in Manchester as development manager for a small start-up and also consulted for a number of companies in the area helping with their web development projects. He was also a senior consultant at at Ibuildings for two and a half years. John has been working in web development for over twelve years, is passionate about open source software and development and is always looking into new technological developments.

He can be found on Twitter at @antz29, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Zoe Slattery

Zoë Slattery

Zoë has worked for over 30 years in the IT industry, and during that time she has held a variety of roles ranging from the deeply technical to senior management. As a technology professional she has worked on storage products (disk and tape firmware), high performance computing (FORTRAN) and is currently a committer for both the PHP language and Apache Aries. As a senior manager, she was responsible for leading teams of up to forty engineers.

As well as speaking at this year's PHP UK Conference, she is the accommodation manager behind the scenes, taking care of where both speakers and organisers are staying while the event is on.