Speakers

Elizabeth Barron is the Executive Director of The PHP Foundation, an organization focused on the long term sustainability of the PHP language and ecosystem. She is a long time open source contributor and advocate with almost 30 years of experience at organizations like GitHub, Pivotal/VMWare, Sourceforge, and CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software). She is also a published author, public speaker, community organizer, and award winning nature photographer. She is currently working toward achieving her MBA and she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Eric Mann is a cybersecurity and infrastructure engineer who has spent twenty years building things that have to work—resilient SaaS platforms, industry-defining e-commerce and AI/ML systems, and the occasional language runtime. He's a PHP 8.3/8.4 Release Manager, an O'Reilly author (PHP Cookbook), and php[architect]'s long-running Security Corner columnist. He's led teams large and small, lectures regularly on scalable engineering and security, and belongs to both ISACA and OWASP. Eric writes code in public, opinions in his column, and the occasional middle-grade adventure novel for his kids.

For over 20 years, Alena has built technical solutions that inform decisions and solve problems across diverse industries. She enjoys both the creativity of programming and the thrill of solving a puzzle. As a leader in the community, a technical trainer, and a mom, she is passionate about providing the tools and mindset required for everyone to learn and succeed.

AmyJune Hineline is the Certification Community Architect at The Linux Foundation, where she collaborates with subject matter experts, community members, and the Education's Global Skills team to develop certification exams, learning programs, and related documentation that reflect open source practices.

A longtime advocate for open source communities, AmyJune is an organizer for Drupal Camp Asheville, Florida DrupalCamp, and a member of the Drupal Community Working Group's Conflict Resolution Team. She is also a member of the CNCF's Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group.

Before finding her way into tech, AmyJune worked as a hospice nurse, where she witnessed firsthand how inaccessible systems can create barriers to the most simple tasks. That experience led her to work in accessibility and community building, including her role as co-organizer of A11yTalks, a monthly event dedicated to digital accessibility.

She helps communities discover how they can contribute and belong in more ways than code. Also known for her superpower: making any meeting 20% more awkward just by showing up.

Andy Snell is a polyglot software engineer and consultant with over fifteen years of experience building, maintaining, and modernizing web applications. Through his consulting company, WickedByte, he helps clients modernize legacy systems, untangle difficult architectural problems, and work through the kinds of systems-level challenges that resist simple answers. He found his way into full-stack web development around the PHP 6 era, and has been speaking at PHP conferences since 2019. Andy brings a practical, approachable perspective to design patterns, software architecture, and modern engineering practice.

Ben is a seasoned software engineer with 25+ years of experience in web applications. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Intuit, he leads the Mailchimp API Core team, managing the Mailchimp public API. A passionate advocate for open source, Ben is a PHP release manager, creator of the ramsey/uuid library, and an active community contributor. A prolific writer and speaker, he has contributed to books, articles, and conferences. Connect with him on the web at https://ben.ramsey.dev or on the Fediverse at @[email protected].

Chris Lemon is a software developer who loves all things PHP and Laravel. In a former life, he worked as an archaeologist, but traded in his shovel for a keyboard. He now leads a team of developers at Vehikl, working with clients to build out incredible web applications

Damian is a Senior Software Engineer at Printify, where he focuses on software architecture, legacy refactoring, and modular monolith patterns. He is passionate about Clean Architecture, Hexagonal Architecture, and Domain-Driven Design — topics he brings to life not just in code, but on stage.

As a workshop facilitator, he has delivered his full-day “Refactoring Towards Clean Architecture” workshop at four international events, including SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025, SymfonyOnline 2026, and SymfonyLive Berlin 2026, consistently earning participant ratings above 4.5/5. Prior to that, he spent several years speaking at Polish PHP conferences including PHPCon, PHPers Summit, and 4developers. He gave his first conference talk at Boiling Frogs 2026 — Poland’s most selective software architecture conference — and was subsequently invited as a guest on the Better Software Design podcast to discuss the topic.

Outside of work, Damian is a devoted father and husband based in Pomerania, Poland. He is an avid cyclist and runs RowerowyDziad, a YouTube channel and social media dedicated to cycling.

Dan Soppelsa is a software consultant and Laravel community organizer who has spent over a decade building and scaling PHP applications. He’s passionate about developer experience, clean architecture, and modern PHP practices. Daniel also co-hosts the monthly Laravel Worldwide Meetup, helping connect the global PHP community through shared learning and discussion.

Open source contributor and PHP 8.5/8.6 release manager, @DanielEScherzer on GitHub. See https://scherzer.dev/ for more.

Dave Stokes is an open-source evangelist and database expert. He is the author of MySQL & JSON - A Practical Programming Guide. He lives in North Texas with the mandated pickup truck, hound dogs, and guitars.

Proud dad of 👧🧒🧒🧒👧👧, Coder, Author, Speaker, Geek. Vim, PHP 🐘, Rust 🦀, OpenSource! PHP Profiling @ Datadog

Gunnard Engebreth is a seasoned Software Engineering Manager and Architect with over 25 years of experience leading high-performing development teams and modernizing legacy systems. Currently serving as Software Engineering Manager at Realtime Software Solutions, he oversees multiple agile teams, drives architectural decisions, and champions DevOps culture across web and mobile applications. Gunnard is the author of PHP 8 Revealed and PHP 8 Basics, and a frequent speaker at conferences such as MadisonPHP, LonghornPHP, and php[tek]. His technical expertise spans Docker, LAMP stack, AWS, CI/CD pipelines, and PHP application security. Gunnard is passionate about empowering developers with practical tools and modern workflows that bridge legacy codebases to future-ready solutions.Living in the North Georgia Blue Ridge mountains he spends his time managing code and databases as well as cows, pigs and chickens.

Holly Schilling has been writing PHP since 2001, back when PHP 4 was the new hotness and she was in no hurry to move on to PHP 5. She leads engineering teams building mobile apps and SDKs, and is a firm believer in choosing the right tool for the job—which, often turns out to be PHP. She can be found co-hosting the PHP Architect Podcast with Sara Golemon and Joe Ferguson. Recently, she's become involved with the PHP Internals team, drafting RFCs for Structs, Generics, Extensions, Modules, and Surfaces.

João Gilberto Magalhães has been building software with PHP for more than 25 years. He has worked as a developer, software architect, CTO, entrepreneur, and university professor, helping build and modernize platforms in areas such as payments, telecommunications, online gaming, and critical services.

João is the founder of ByJG and the maintainer of several open-source PHP projects covering APIs, messaging, testing, and software architecture. He is based in Canada and enjoys challenging the idea that PHP is only suitable for traditional web applications.

I live in Maple Ridge, BC, Canada. It's about an hour east of Vancouver. I've been writing code since about 2003, and writing it well since about 2019. I have a wife and two kids. I co-founded a small Laravel/PHP agency called Artisan Build. We have a small portfolio of products, a long list of open source packages and software, and a growing portfolio of video content.

Linc has been leading teams as an engineering & product executive for over a decade, beginning with Director of Engineering at Vanilla Forums, recently VP Engineering at uConnect, and now Sr Director of Product at Bond Brand Loyalty. He has been an active community manager for over 25 years, which is both how he came to PHP and why he never left. His PHP open source project Nitro Porter, the only multi-platform community migration tool, was recently selected for NLNet funding.

Rachele is a senior accessibility engineer who believes in information integrity and accessibility for all through inclusive design principles.

Rachele is a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA). She earned her Master of Science degree in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin School of Information with a specialization in user experience design, including support work for making systems work for people with disabilities.

Rachele enjoys working remotely from her home in Austin, Texas, and spending time with her husband and four cats.

Steve Grunwell is an independent software engineer with nearly two decades of experience. He’s passionate about teaching and contributing back to the development community through speaking, blogging, and open-source work.

When he’s not writing tests or finding new ways to automate the world around him, Steve is off spending time with his family, tinkering with electronics, playing guitar, or otherwise getting away from the keyboard.

Zach Watkins is a software engineer at Texas Transportation Institute with 19 years of experience providing websites and web applications for the public and private sector. He has a BFA and has done everything from website designs and front-end coding to building APIs with job queues and end-to-end test automation. He has been a public speaker on technical subjects since 2015 and in his current role he works with civil engineers and researchers to save time, lives, and resources by developing custom technology solutions for transportation research grants.