Sessions

Keynotes

• PHP is People: The Foundation, the Community, and You

  

  Elizabeth Barron

  PHP isn't an institution. It's people. Every feature you rely on, every security patch, every page of documentation exists because someone chose to show up. The PHP Foundation funds 12 core developers who work to keep the language secure, modern, and moving forward, but the language belongs to millions. The space between those 12 and those millions? That's where you come in. In this keynote, I'll take you inside what The PHP Foundation has been doing and why: the commits, reviews, and RFCs shaping PHP's future, the hard-won lessons about sustaining open source at the scale of the web, and how partnering with this community has moved PHP forward. I'll also be honest about what lies ahead. Because the challenges facing PHP are facing all of open source: aging and overwhelmed maintainers, uncertainty in AI times, funding gaps, and infrastructure that the whole internet depends on but few people sustain. These problems aren't solved by foundations alone. They're solved by communities that decide to act. PHP has given freely to our careers for over thirty years. Now we get to shape the next thirty. You don't need to be a core developer to matter here, you just need to show up, like every person who built this language and community has done. The future of PHP isn't something that happens to us. It's something we build, together.

• The Commit You Can't Take Back: Conscience in a Career That Builds the Future

  

  Eric Mann

  Every engineer eventually faces a commit they're not sure they should make. I've faced a few—and walked away from work I couldn't reconcile, including offensive AI targeting in defense and pivotal moments building cryptographic and financial infrastructure where the right call cost something real.

  This keynote isn't a lecture on morality. It's a candid account from twenty years in the rooms where these decisions get made: defense contracts, DARPA programs, crypto and distributed finance, and now AI. We'll talk about dual-use technology—the same embedding pipeline that powers search can power surveillance—and the quiet, compounding pressure to just ship. We'll talk about what it actually costs to say "no," why "I just built the tool" stopped being a defense years ago, and how to build a career where your conscience and your craft don't have to be enemies.

  You write the future for a living. This is a conversation about doing it on purpose.