Ilia Alshanetsky the principal of Advanced Internet Designs Inc., company specializing in security auditing, performance analysis and application developments. He is the author of FUDforum (http://fudforum.org), a highly popular, Open Source bulletin board focused on providing the maximum functionality at the highest level of security and performance. Ilia is a Core PHP Developer, an active member of PHP’s Q&A team and was the Release Master for the 4.3.X PHP series. He authored and co-authored a number of extensions with notables such as SHMOP, PDO, SQLite and GD and is responsible for large number of bug fixes and performance tweaks in the language. A prolific lecturer and writer, Ilia can found speaking at international conferences and is frequently published in print and online magazines on a variety of PHP topics. He is also the author of an upcoming book on PHP security. Ilia can be reached at ilia@ilia.ws

Since my graduation from the university of applied sciences for Telecommunications and Media in St.Pölten (Austria) in 2003, I worked for Telekom Austria as an internet developer and designer.

Alexander Aulbach has been programming PHP since about 9 years. So he belongs to the dinosaurs of PHP-programming who know what PHP/FI was :) Working for Mayflower GmbH he has the chance to bring back some of his knowledge to the community.

Arne Blankerts ist als Leiter der Entwicklung bei der Hamburger Werbeagentur SalesEmotion AdSolutions GmbH tätig und zeichnet sich dort schwerpunktmäßig für die technische Konzeption sowie die Entwicklung von internet-basierten Anwendungen unter Einsatz von PHP, XML und XUL verantwortlich. Er schreibt zudem seit einigen Jahren regelmäßig für das deutsche PHP Magazin und tritt bei (PHP-)Konferenzen als Sprecher auf.

Mr. Cecchet is the Principal Architect at Continuent, Inc. and has extensive experience providing open source middleware for large-scale data servers. He contributed to the DynaServer project at Rice University, focusing on the design of scalable, high-performance and highly available e-business servers. He is also the Chief Architect of the ObjectWeb international open source consortium and the leader of the C-JDBC project (http://c-jdbc.objectweb.org). Mr. Cecchet holds a Ph.D. from Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France.

Volker Göbbels can be met on most International PHP Conferences. Being the owner of Arachnion GmbH & Co. KG he has been working with PHP for several years now on sophisticated e-commerce and systems integration projects for fast a growing number of national and internation customers. He has published several articles, reviewed a number of php related books and is currently working on a book dealing with PHP development with Eclipse.

Zak Greant is a professional Free Software/Open Source advocate, programmer and author. He is a regular speaker at conference like OSCON, LinuxTag and the PHP International Conference. His past projects include chairing the 2003 and 2004 MySQL Users Conference, several years acting as the MySQL AB Community Advocate and editing numerous PHP and MySQL books. For more information visit: http://zak.greant.com/.

Christopher Kunz is one of the "regulars" at the International PHP Conference. He has been doing PHP for over 6 years and is one of the owners of Filoo GmbH, a PHP-powered company that does hosting, housing and consulting for a number of international customers. An active member of the german PHP community, Christopher currently participates in the Hardened-PHP team and OWASP. He has authored numerous articles about all kinds of PHP-related topics and has co-written a book about PHP security.

Karl Heinz Marbaise arbeitet seit ca. 6 Jahren mit PHP in unterschiedlichen Bereichen (High Performance Applikationen, CMS, eCommerce, eGovernment), weiterhin im Bereich Software Konfigurationsmanagement mit Open Source Tools (RCS, CVS, Subversion, SVK) und er ist als Fachautor von Zeitschriften Artikeln tätig.

Stefan Neufeind works in consulting, development and administration for SpeedPartner GmbH. They provide complete web solutions for small businesses and actively contribute to various free software projects. You may have seen Stefan at a conference, read an article from him or have seen him in several open-source-projects.

Derick Rethans provides solutions for Internet related problems. He has contributed in a number of ways to the PHP project, including the mcrypt extension, bug fixes, additions and leading the QA team. He now works as developer for eZ systems A.S.. In his spare time he likes to work on SRM: Script Running Machine and Xdebug, watch movies and travel. You can reach him at dr@ez.no

Georg Richter is the author of PHP's mysql extensions. He works for MySQL AB as a Senior Developer (SAP R/3 adaption, PHP's mysql extensions, Connector/OO.org), contributes code to various Open Source projects and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

Tobias Kunze Briseño is Head of Portal Technology and Senior Development Manager at Pangorga GmbH, a 100% subsidiary of Lycos Europe. He joined Pangora coming from California's Silicon Valley, where he developed network-based technologies at Zack Systems and worked as a software engineer at Silicon Graphics. Besides his professional work, he has been an active contributor to open software projects for over 15 years.

Björn Schotte setzt als Chefredakteur des PHP Magazins und Head of Chair der International PHP Conferences die Trends im deutschsprachigen PHP-Markt. Als einer von vier geschäftsführenden Gesellschaftern der Mayflower GmbH, die seit Jahren mit ihrer Marke ThinkPHP internationales Rennomée im LAMP-Bereich erlangt, betreut er internationale Großkunden in LAMP-Projekten.

Lukas Smith (smith@pooteeweet.org) is a well known contributor to the PEAR project (pear.php.net). Among other things he is known for the MDB and MDB2 database abstraction layer and his work on the LiveUser authentication and permission package. He is also an active contributor to the organization of the project itself being one of the founding members of the PEAR group. He earns his living as a freelance web application developer.

Started working as an IT and business process consultant after graduating in economics. Worked employed and freelance in several projects with different technological backgrounds, including PHP, ASP, Delphi/Pascal, Visual Basic, Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL, Windows, Linux. Joined Globalpark GmbH in 2003 as IT project manager. Since then working on the company's product OPST, a large PHP application for conducting online surveys.

Zeev Suraski, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Zend Technologies Zeev, along with Andi Gutmans, is the one of the architects of PHP, having written a new language implementation from scratch that was officially released as PHP 3.0. The PHP 3.0 release quickly made PHP's popularity boon and attracted the masses to develop in the language through its powerful extensibility features. The pair then went on to develop the Zend Engine I, the scripting language that powers PHP 4.0 that further revolutionized the performance and reliability of PHP. He and his colleague Andi, have also designed and implemented the Zend PHP 4.0 components and have recently been driving the design and implementation of the Zend Engine II, which powers PHP 5.

Markus Wolff has been programming PHP since 1999. During the past years, he has worked on numerous web sites, intranets and database applications. Besides his commercial work, he has also contributed two packages to the PEAR project (so far). He is currently working on intranet applications using PHP, XUL, AJAX and PostgreSQL for PressWatch AG in Hamburg.

Aaron Wormus is a freelancer based in Frankfurt Germany. With a background in client/server development and intranet infrastructure, Aaron uses PHP to bring cost effective and simple back-end solutions to medium and small sized enterprises. In his spare time, Aaron writes the weekly PHPBarnstormer column, a regular column for PHP Solutions magazine and is contributing to an upcoming book on PHP Application development.