Derick Rethans will be joining us in all seven cities of the tour. He has contributed in a number of ways to the PHP project, including the Xdebug, mcrypt, date and input-filter extensions, bug fixes, additions, and leading the QA team. In addition, Derick was also the PHP release manager for several versions of PHP4. He’s a frequent lecturer at conferences, the author of php|architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming, and the co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming, along with numerous other PHP articles in various publications. Derick now works as project leader for the eZ components project for eZ systems A.S. In his spare time he likes to travel, hike, ski and practice photography.

Want to know some interesting facts about Derick?

• The first thing he did with PHP was crawling websites for e-mail addresses and sending spam.
• He has three years of dancing lessons.
• The cover of his book features a photograph taken by him.
• He is one of the founding organizers of PHPVikinger.
• He has given over 130 presentations, which can be seen on his site.

Also, here’s what others have to say about him:

I’ll never forget my first PHP conference, php|works in Toronto: the first time I met Derick. There had just been a talk on
internationalization, templating, and performance (at least, I think that’s what it was), and I made some crazy suggestion. During the next talk slot I got to sit beside Derick (OMG a PHP core developer is talking to me!) while he hacked up an extension to make my suggestion work. It was never committed to core or anything, he just worked it up, compiled PHP (a simple feat that impressed me greatly back then), and demonstrated the new extension. It was just an interesting puzzle that he spent a few minutes working on and sharing with me.

Derick knows a lot, about pretty much everything PHP related (or time, I don’t even wear a watch and Derick could probably tell
me when daylight savings time started on the west side of Utah this year). But he is also ready and willing to sit down and just hack things out with anybody. Despite being a “celebrity” in the PHP world, and a core developer to boot, I’ve always found him incredibly approachable. (— — Paul Reinheimer )

Derick will be speaking on the topics of Xdebug, date/time specifics, and improving your development process. We are very excited to have Derick on tour with us!