Speakers

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Edward Barnard

Edward Barnard (@ewbarnard)

Ed Barnard had a front-row seat when the Morris Worm took down the Internet, November 1988. He was teaching CRAY-1 supercomputer operating system internals to analysts as they were being directly hit by the Worm. It was a busy week! Ed continues to indulge his interests in computer security and teaching software concepts to others.

Tutorial: Binary for IoT

Tim Bond

Tim Bond (@TimB0nd)

Tim is a senior full stack PHP developer that has been working with PHP for 14 years and has seen PHP grow from its hodgepodged roots to a modern development language. When not in front of a computer, you'll probably find him hiking or biking around beautiful Seattle, or putting together a new Lego set on one of the rare rainy days.

Tutorial: Native Mobile Apps with Tabris.js

Gunnard Engebreth

Gunnard Engebreth (@gunnard)

Gunnard Engebreth an E-commerce developer at Full Compass. Hailing from Atlanta, Ga he brings 20+ years of Development experience to this stronghold company.

Short Talk: Tmux and VIM as an IDE

Nate Finch

Nate Finch (@n8finch)

Nate has been building websites for individuals, non-profits, embassies, and businesses for about 5 years now. He builds on WordPress, so he and his clients can easily manage and update the sites. He loves web development because it's the perfect mix of problem solving, building, and life-long learning. Nate is an avid learner and has made a habit of collecting masters degrees. He's also been to six continents (not Antarctica yet!), lived on four, speaks Spanish, and is varying degrees of conversational in a couple other languages. Family, friends, food, coffee, and cooking are his favorite activities outside of work. He now lives in Wisconsin with his wonderful wife and daughter.

Talk: Getting Started with WP-CLI

Short Talk: More Secure API Requests with WordPress Helper Functions

Larry Garfield

Larry Garfield (@Crell)

Larry Garfield has been building websites since he was a sophomore in high school, which is longer ago than he'd like to admit. Larry was an active Drupal contributor and consultant for over a decade, and led the Drupal 8 Web Services initiative that helped transform Drupal into a modern PHP platform. Larry is Director of Developer Experience at Platform.sh, a leading continuous deployment cloud hosting company. He is also a member of the PHP-FIG Core Committee. Larry holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from DePaul University. He blogs at both https://platform.sh/ and https://www.garfieldtech.com/.

Short Talk: Building a Cloud-friendly Application

Hrushikesh Ghatpande

Hrushikesh Ghatpande (@thehrushi)

From Pune, India. Currently living and working in Madison, WI. Manufacturing Engineer by profession. PHP enthusiast and UX philosopher by choice. My job, as a Manufacturing Systems Engineer and UX philosopher is to act as a bridge, who translates real-world requirements and practical considerations into technical write-ups for the UI/UX developers and vice-versa. In my spare time, I enjoy photography, multimedia editing, and social networking. http://ghatpande.com

Talk: UX Design for the Internet of Things

Daniel Greig

Daniel Greig

Daniel Greig is a team and technical lead at Earthling Interactive. He has worked in a variety of languages and systems over the last 15 years.

Talk: Extending and Writing with Gutenberg

Workshop: Plugins. What Are They Good For?

Corey Halpin

Corey Halpin

Corey Halpin is a software engineer at the Internet Scout Research Group in the Department of Computer Sciences at UW-Madison. Scout works at the intersection of Computer Science and Library and Information Science, creating digital resource collections and software to support them. Our flagship application is the Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS), an open source (GPL), turn-key package for creating and managing digital libraries. Prior to joining Scout, Corey earned a PhD in Forestry from UW-Madison by using simulation models (written primarily in C++, Perl, Lua, and GNU R) to understand the patterns of biomass development in the forests of northern Wisconsin.

Talk: Doing more with SSH

David Hayes

David Hayes (@davidbhayes)

Hi! I'm David, a developer from Fort Collins, Colorado. I've been working with PHP for over a decade, and does a lot of intensive backend work, a fair bit of Javascript, and dabbles with CSS sometimes. While I'm big into WordPress, I own and run the popular development tutorial site WPShout (http://wpshout.com). I've got experience with everything from old school PHP to the latest and greatest of Symfony and Laravel.

Tutorial: WordPress Security Auditing, Applied

Vesna Kovach

Vesna Kovach (@vesna_v_k)

Vesna Kovach lives in Columbus, Wisconsin, a historic town near Madison. She likes steampunk, retro cookery, gaming, and growing unusual vegetables.

Talk: Beyond FizzBuzz: Master Job Interview Coding Challenges

Debbie Marks

Debbie Marks

Debbie used to be a mechanical engineer and currently works as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist while secretly pursuing her web development degree. In her private practice she sees people with depression and anxiety and relationship issues. She has a retirement plan to travel around the country in her motor home with her husband and do freelance web development. She attends Madison College and Madison PHP Meetup meetings. She enjoys walking and reading in her spare time.

Workshop: Communication Boot Camp for Developers

Keynote: Conquering Your Inner Critic

Oscar Merida

Oscar Merida (@omerida)

Oscar still remembers downloading an early version of the Apache HTTP server at the end of 1995, and promptly asking "Ok, what's this good for?" He started learning PHP in 2000 and hasn't stopped since. He's worked with Drupal, WordPress, Zend Framework, Silex, and bespoke PHP, to name a few. Currently, he's the Editor-in-chief at php[architect]

Talk: Object-oriented Programming in Practice

Marsha Schwanke

Marsha Schwanke

Marsha Schwanke develops web projects, online training, and accessible materials for a grant-funded regional center of the Burton Blatt Institute (BBI) at Syracuse University. Her focus is maximizing access and usability based on "best practices" and established guidelines, such as the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Ms. Schwanke has a Bachelors in Therapeutic Recreation from Ohio University and a Masters in Information Technology from American Intercontinental University. She is a Certified Therapeutic Recreation Specialist (CTRS) and has over 30 years experience as a manager, practitioner, and volunteer working with children and adults with disabilities in hospital, long-term care, and community settings. She has authored and facilitated over 100 presentations and trainings on disability awareness, web access, and assistive technology.

Talk: Web Access Jeopardy

Hilary Stohs-Krause

Hilary Stohs-Krause (@hilarysk)

Hilary Stohs-Krause is currently based in Madison, WI, working as a full-stack software developer at Ten Forward Consulting. She came to tech by way of childhood website-building (a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fansite, to be exact). She volunteers regularly with several tech and community organizations, and co-runs Madison Women in Tech, a local group with more than 1,000 members. She tweets feminism, puns and tech at @hilarysk.

Short Talk: Using Our Powers for Good: Tech and Social Impact

Dave Stokes

Dave Stokes (@stoker)

Dave Stokes is a MySQL Community Manager for Oracle and has been using PHP since it was called Personal Home Page

Talk: MySQL 8 -- A New Beginning

Short Talk: PHP and The MySQL Document Store

Mike Stowe

Mike Stowe (@mikegstowe)

Author of Undisturbed REST, Michael Stowe has spoken at conferences around the world. An active advocate for creating better architectures and interfaces, his work has also been featured on ProgrammableWeb, DZone, and InfoQ. You can view his past talks and slides here and follow him on Twitter @mikegstowe.

Tutorial: Call... Text... Video Me Maybe?

Philipp Strazny

Philipp Strazny

Philipp Strazny is a translator, localizer, and web programmer and works for The Geo Group, a translation agency based in Madison. A native German, he moved to the U.S. in 1994 and now lives with his family in Manitowoc. More info at:
- The Geo Group - see blog articles
- LinkedIn profile
- private blog

Short Talk: Localizing Websites

Chris Tankersley

Chris Tankersley (@dragonmantank)

Chris Tankersley is a husband, father, author, speaker, PHP developer, podcast host, and probably lots of other things he's forgetting to mention. He works for InQuest, a network security company out of Washington, DC, but lives in Northwest Ohio where it is much colder sometimes. Chris has worked with many different frameworks and languages throughout his twelve years of programming, but spends most of his day working in PHP, with a sprinkling of Python thrown in for good measure. He is the author of "Docker for Developers," and works with companies and developers for integrating containers into their workflows.

Keynote: How We Got Here, A Brief History of Open Source

Trezy

Trezy (@RollForTrezy)

Tutorial: Simplify Your Workflow With Docker

Naveen VK

Naveen VK (@navnoon)

Naveen VK is a Principal Architect at NVISIA, a regional software development partner. Over the last 19 years she has designed and built custom applications using the Java Enterprise stack for industry leading companies in the finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing and government sectors, including the State of Wisconsin. Her projects typically include multi-tier, custom applications where she is involved in the entire application life cycle including requirements gathering, design, coding, integration, testing and deployment. In addition to coding in Java since 1997, she also has deep expertise in databases like Oracle (since 1994) and DB2 (since 1999) with SQL queries and stored procedures. She is an expert with frameworks like Spring (Core Spring, Spring Data, Spring Web Services, Spring IO, Spring AMQP, Spring Web Flow, Spring Boot) and Hibernate. She is a founder and a board member of Codecinella, a contributor to the architecture team at her current client and has earned a spot on NVISIA's senior leadership team. She enjoys sharing her expertise through technical talks and presentations at various meetups in Madison and Milwaukee.

Talk: Machine Learning Algorithms

Pauline Vos

Pauline Vos (@vanamerongen)

Pauline is a PHP developer currently employed by Werkspot in Amsterdam. She likes good, clean software design and being as efficient (lazy) as possible. Also cocktails, video games and animal memes. She lives in Amsterdam with her cat, Phife Cat, and about three plants.

Talk: Git Legit

Justin Yost

Justin Yost (@justinyost)

Justin is a Senior Software Engineer with Wirecutter working on building out a REST API and client app that powers the product database. Justin relishes programming, learning more about everything and anything, teaching and dislikes the Oxford comma. He is a course author for LinkedIn Learning covering topics such as; PHP, CakePHP, Ember.js, Unit Testing and REST APIs and gives talks regularly at the local PHP Meetup. In what time is left over from all that, he backpacks on occasion and enjoys a good book.

Tutorial: Laravel: Building APIs Like a Pro