Software architect by profession but mathematician by education, Arnout has his interests on the boundary between the two, where formal modelling and logical reasoning meet practical problems and pragmatism. He works at Moxio, where he solves complex information management problems with innovative software, and aims to grow a culture of learning and quality. In his free time he contributes to a number of open source projects, like PHP-CPD, PHP_CodeSniffer and Symfony, and more recently the PHP core.

Beau Simensen (@beausimensen, beau.io) has been a professional polyglot programmer since 1998. He is a Technical Product Manager for Blackfire (blackfire.io) and is co-host of That Podcast (@thatpodcast, thatpodcast.io). An active open-sourcer, he created Sculpin (sculpin.io) and helped create Stack PHP (stackphp.com). He is also a serving Core Comitte member for the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG) (php-fig.org). Beau is a proponent of framework agnostic code. Unglue all the things!

Branislav Bujišić is a Product Engineer with a key role in the Platform.sh accounts platform and user tools team. He loves helping clients use and understand the product via demos and trainings. His technical interests lie in automation of everything and best practices in development, deployment and lifecycle management. Away from the command line, he is passionate about good craft beers, fine foods, and shiny new technology.

Christophe is a Principal Consultant at GraphAware, helping companies around the world succeed with the Neo4j Graph Platform. He was involved in successful projects implementing recommendation engines, fraud detection and relevant search systems.

He is now focusing on Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Graphs and their implementation in Conversational Interfaces like Chatbots or Voice-Driven Interfaces with Amazon Alexa.

Director of Software Development at Performance Advertising. Previous to that he was CTO of Rebelle, a platform that allows purchasing and selling of designer clothes between its users. Prior to this, he was Head of Development for the About You eCommerce site. He has been working in the business since 2000 as developer, product owner and system architect. Main points of interest are scalability, personalization, machine learning and search engines.

Emily is a Software Engineer in North Carolina and works at InQuest, a network security monitoring company. Her experience includes supporting and modernizing legacy applications, DDD, CQRS, and Event Sourcing practices. She is a Director for Women Who Code Raleigh-Durham and a Co-Organizer of Triangle PHP. In 2016 she began speaking at conferences to share what she's learned working with legacy applications. She enjoys sharing her experiences with others who are maintaining large, legacy applications.

Eryn O’Neil is an independent PHP developer and tech lead based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Coming from the agency world, she has worked on everything from e-commerce and online promotions to developing frameworks and CMSes. Her philosophy is to build software by placing humans first: both the people who will use it and the developers who will build it with you (and maintain it afterward).

Living in Minnesota, Eryn spends most of her free time teaching blues dancing, flying on a trapeze, and wishing it weren’t snowing.

Software Engineer and Developer Advocate at GetStream.io, open source user and contributor, organiser of meetups in Belgium and also a marathon runner.

A software engineer who also loves to share his thoughts about quality, tests and object oriented programming. Active member of the PHP community and contributor to open source projects.

Passionate about being a developer, teacher and mentor for newcomers into world of programming. Works for Code4Hire, remote team of software engineers, offering outsourcing and consulting services. Organiser of @webcampzagreb conference. Enjoys playing and watching sports that Croatians find odd and unpopular.

Marcel is a managing partner and developer at the Beyond Code GmbH in Germany, which builds custom Laravel web projects and focuses on Chatbot development. When he is not on his day job, you can find Marcel working on various open-source PHP projects and maintaining the most popular PHP chatbot framework “BotMan”.

Marco "Ocramius" Pivetta is a software consultant at Roave. With over a decade of experience with PHP, he is part of the Zend Framework CR team, Doctrine core team, and is also active in the community as a mentor and supporter. When not coding for work, he usually hacks together new concepts and open source libraries, or simply discusses software development techniques with various community members

Mark is Lead/Senior Developer at Paybreak, a fintech company based in Altrincham near Manchester, UK.

He has worked in the computer software industry since before symbolics.com was registered as a domain name, before "cyberspace" was first mentioned in fiction, when Linus Torvalds and Rasmus Lerdorf were still at high school, and Mrs. Zuckerberg had yet to give birth to a bouncing baby social network enabler; and has developed for the Web in many different languages since the days when the Tim Berners-Lee's creation comprised less than 1,000 sites.

Over those years he has contributed to a number of open source projects: including a minor submission to PHP's SPL. Currently he is coordinator and lead developer for the PHPExcel library, and a coordinator and developer on the PHPOffice library suite. Most recently, he has been working on new datastructures such as Tries, Quadtrees and Matrices; hoping that he'll eventually be able to get them included in SPL.

His particular interests include PHP integration with office suites, Generators, Textual analysis, Geodata and geographic information systems, and "big data" and data analysis.

Michael Cullum is a backend PHP developer, working particularly with Symfony, and has been for about nine years. He currently works at SamKnows as a senior software engineer & architect handling and processing huge amounts of internet measurement data. He is also a manager & core developer at phpBB where he has been a contributor for over half a decade and more recently he founded the new PHP Surrey User Group. He is actively involved in the PHP FIG previously as editor of PSR 12 and running the administration of the FIG as the PHP FIG Secretary, he now sits on the Core Committee, the steering group of the FIG.

Michael is a polyglot software engineer, committed to reducing complexity in systems and making them more predictable. Working with a variety of languages and tools, he shares his technical expertise to audiences all around the world at user groups and conferences.

Day to day, Michael is a developer advocate at Nexmo. He spends his time learning, teaching and writing about all kinds of technology. When not immersed in technology, you'll find him either playing various board games or hiking through the countryside.

Veteran of PHP affairs, BDD practitioner, devops enthusiast

I started using PHP as a student, back in 1999. At first I worked as a one man band web developer and from there I progressed, via focusing on PHP development in a team environment, to be a senior dev, tech lead & technical analyst.

I found much more happiness doing backend stuff so I focus on scalable backends and devops tasks this days.

Robert is a software engineer and PHP consultant. He doesn't shy away from maintaining legacy applications and writing documentation, fixing bugs with the help of tests and believes communication with business stakeholders is the way to develop software. Loves contributing to open source, and is a core contributor to Mockery, a PHP mock object framework for use in unit testing. Author of pugdebug, a standalone debugging client for PHP that uses XDebug as the debugging engine.

Slobodan Stojanović is CTO of Cloud Horizon, a software development studio based in Montreal Canada. He is based in Belgrade and is the JS Belgrade meetup co-organizer.

He is also Claudia.js core team member and co-author of "Serverless Apps with Node and Claudia.js" book, published by Manning Publications.

Tobias is a software entrepreneur and have spent many years working within the web development ecosystem. He is organizer of Swedish PHP meetups, co-host of the Sound of Symfony podcast and a public speaker and Symfony core team member. He has also written for php[architect] and is a certified Symfony developer. Open source takes a large part of the day. Tobias is actively maintaining httplug.io, php-cache.com, php-translation, guzzle, buzz, php-geocoder, KnpGithub API client, Maingun API client, LinkedIn API client, Neo4j bundle and many more. He also writes a PSR for HTTP clients.

Software architect with over 10 years of experience in web applications industry. Functional Programming enthusiast pursuing the ultimate goal of software quality and maintainability. An author of several open source libraries. Provides well-designed and open solutions to technical problems.