VP, Experience, Search, and Platforms
eBay

Hugh Williams has spent nearly twenty years researching and developing search engines and web services. He is the Vice President of Search, Experience, and Platforms at eBay Inc., where his responsibilities include eBay’s search engine, most of eBay’s global user experiences, and eBay’s platforms. He previously managed a large R&D team at Microsoft’s Bing, and prior to that was a tenured professor in Australia. He has published over 100 works, mostly in the field of Information Retrieval, and including two books: “Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL” and “Learning Mysql” for O’Reilly Media Inc. He holds 5 patents and has 25 patents pending. He has a PhD from RMIT University in Australia.

I'm Andy Brockhurst, but everyone just calls me Bob.
I've been at the BBC for just over a year having previously spent nearly five years at Yahoo!. I've been working with PHP daily since around 2000.

At the BBC I'm a Principal Engineer in the Frameworks/Platforms team where we are responsible for Apache, PHP, Varnish and Zend Framework, Frameworks which extend ZF, some core libraries, the global BBC Header/Footer and some Java services thrown in for good measure.

I'm also a father, husband, hacker, maker, tinkerer, marksman, brewer and charity worker.

I'm addicted to anything to do with Space, Science, Tech and Robots.

In 2004, Brandon Savage discovered that he could automate things using PHP. His passion grew into a hobby, and that into a career, eventually landing him at Mozilla as a web developer on Socorro, Mozilla's crash reporting system. Brandon is passionate about technology and software development. Brandon is based in Olney, Maryland.

Davey Shafik has been working with PHP and the LAMP stack, as well as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for over a decade. With several books, articles, and conference appearances under his belt, he enjoys teaching others any way he can. An avid photographer, he lives in sunny Florida with his wife and six cats.

Software Engineer at Ibuildings. I'm a nerdy programmer type who spends most of my time trying to be a better developer, with varying degrees of success. When I'm not doing either of the above I'll be playing the guitar or the drums - generally being noisy. Or enjoying a Venti Skinny Misto and some Crispy M&Ms.

Helgi is an Icelander transplanted in Ireland, working as the VP of Engineering and partner at Echolibre, an Irish company that prides it self of helping startups realise their dreams.

In his spare time Helgi is a PEAR extraordinaire, author, lecturer and passionate about anything performance related. Currently all his attention is divided between the PEAR installer, Pyrus and FRAPI.

Helgi frequently gives talks at various PHP and Web conferences around the world as well as writing articles for print and web magazines alike.

I'm James Littlejohn, the lead developer on the LifestyleLinking.net open source project. This involves combining ideas, curiosity and plain hard slog in aggregating data so that it may reveal its collective intelligence. I've also learnt to write PHP code over the last 4 years while experimenting with data mining techniques.

Before that, my entrepreneurial activities have including starting a web software company in Edinburgh during the .com era and a local food e-commerce and home delivery service in Aberdeen, Scotland. I spent a few years in Mountain View, CA during the early web2.0 years where I began my conversion to become a software data engineer.

Oslo-based system developer at Redpill Linpro with a particular interest in web development and PHP. She has a passion for free and open source software, and holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Tromsø and Lancaster University. June also has a healthy interest in cognitive skills and the workings of the mind.

LB Denker graduated from RIT with a BS/MS in Computational Mathematics/Computer Science. She then moved on to a small job in a small city in central New York before being courted by Google, bringing her to the Big Apple, where she worked in both test and development for over 4 years. Now she has taken a turn for the handmade, helping Etsy grow its spectacular development culture and continuous deployment process as the self-proclaimed Anthropologist of Developer Operations.

I am Nikolay and I am long-time WordPress contributor. I spend my busy time working for Automattic – the company behind WordPress.com and other cool stuff. Although I am not a systems guy, I think more developers should be interested in servers and scaling – specialization is for insects.

I also teach at Sofia University, organize TEDxBG, and have a bear.

Software Architect at PlusNet. PHP developer, always seeking for new experience. Experienced in medium and large web applications. Interested in Web development, database designing and administering.

Steph is a user experience strategist who has worn many hats, including a product lead for a startup in digital publishing and a studio director at a digital agency. Currently the Editor-in-Chief for Web Standards Sherpa [http://webstandardssherpa/], she is known for her grassroots contributions to best web practices.

Her background in computer science has served her surprisingly well in her passion for design and making ideas real. Well-travelled and living on her fourth island, she speaks several flavours of English, a few languages, and possesses an indecipherable accent.