After the release of PHP 7, the PHP community is growing at a rapid pace. There are a lot of influencers that you need to follow in 2017.

If you love PHP community then keep track of these influencers as what they are up to and what they love. By keeping yourself up-to-date about what these influencers are doing is the great and the best way of checking the current happenings in the community. These are some top PHP influencers you must follow in 2017 who have worked a lot in PHP community and have gained a lot of fame with their remarkable efforts done by them for the PHP community..

Here are some of the influencers that I found.

Taylor Otwell

The web developer and the creator of Laravel, Forge, Envoyer and more. The first personality in the list to follow up in 2017.

He got the education from Arkansas Tech University. Then started working as a Systems Analyst in Data-Tronics Corp. from May 2008 – January 2012 (3 years 9 months) and now is working as a Software Engineer at UserScape.

 

Sandy Smith

A  PHP developer from 15 years and loves to do Career Management and Career Planning . He lives in Washington DC. He loves to work for both in-house and in agencies. He had worked with hundred of organizations.

He is a Senior Software Engineer, Innovations At Truth Initiative, CEO of php[architect] from Jan 2013 – Present (4 yrs 1 month) and Founding Partner & CEO Musketeers.me from Aug 2012 – Present and worked in other organizations as well.

Kevin Bruce

The third in the list is Kevin Bruce the sole Designer/Front End Developer working in the band of developers called musketeers.me. He has experience of over 20 years as a Web Designer and a Web Developer.

He runs a local design meet-up and is a national speaker who loves addressing  in tech conferences. The evangelist of clean design and clean code is now working as a Web Applications Developer at  Yakabod, Inc. from Dec 2016 – Present.

Fabien Potencier

Fabien Potencier, the founder of Symfony Framework, has completed his studies from HEC School of Management in 1997 .He started his own company in France in June 1998 and named it Sensio, but later shifted the company to Canada in 2008 and then in the US. In 2005 he got the license of his framework, Symfony.

 

 

Brandon Savage

A software Developer with more than ten years experience. He worked on a project namely,  Socorro, which is the Firefox’s crash collection and analysis system. 

Brandon is certified, private pilot. He is both a national and an international speaker and has spoken at many conferences like OSCON, PHP UK, ZendCon and user groups like DC PHP and Baltimore PHP. Check out Mastering Object Oriented PHP and Practical Design Patterns in PHP.

Adam Culp

Adam Culp- PHP Certified Engineer is the Senior Professional Services Consultant at Zend Technologies from Apr 2013 – Present. He is a public speaker and a trainer and is the organizer of SoFloPHP and SunshinePHP Developer Conference.

 

 

Derick Rethans

He is a mapping enthusiast, a PHP internals expert and author of Xdebug, php|architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming  and an OpenStreetMap and co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming.

He is the PHP Engineer/Evangelist at MongoDB and worked on the PHP and HHVM drivers for MongoDB. He frequently gives lectures at conferences, In his spare time, he likes to travel, hike, ski and practise photography.

Sebastian Bergmann

He is the co-founder of thePHP.cc Information Technology and Services. His test framework PHPUnit is a de-facto standard. He is Co-Founder and Managing Director at BBP Consulting & Publishing GmbH from Jul 2015 – Present in Hamburg, Germany. He shares his experience and knowledge through his widely-read books and articles. Sebastian love to hack on Open Source Software and loves to take photographs when he is free.

Eli White

Eli White loves to write code in PHP, and also an author at eliw.com and a speaker. He does conferences for a living. He is a vivid gamer , loves to play Xbox. And in free time he loves to do Medieval Reenactment in the SCA. He loves to do archery, armored combat, brewing, and woodworking.

 

 

Elizabeth Barron

She loves to work in tech. She writes sci-fi novels , loves to take photos and runs an Etsy shop. She was a PHP Community Manager at Engine Yard from Oct 2011 – Nov 2012. And now works as a Patchwork Community Manager at GitHub from Dec 2012 – Present.

 

 

Michelangelo van Dam

A professional PHP consultant and Zend Framework expert who also works for the government and larger expertises. He is the president of PHPBenelux, which is a PHP group running in Belgium Netherlands and Luxembourg. He is a speaker and speaks on several PHP conferences all around the world.  He is the CEO of In2IT from Jan 2011 – Present, Co-Founder of PHP Europe,  Member of the board at PHPBenelux, Coach at CoderDojo Belgium and Secretary at Dutch Web Alliance.

Rafael Dohms

Rafael Dohms, a Web developer and an experienced in PHP development. He is a PHP Evangelist and an author at doh.ms, public speaker, and contributor. He founded 3 active User Groups during his experience and  an active member of the community.

In his spare time, he helps to manage the Amsterdam PHP User Group, amongst other projects. He is also the Lead Backend Engineer at Usabilla from Jul 2016 – Present.

Matthew Weier O’Phinney

Matthew is the  Project Lead of Zend Framework at Zend Technologies from Apr 2009 – Present. He is a Zend Certified Engineer and is an active member of the Zend Education Advisory Board. The activities of this group is to authorize the Zend Certification Exam. He loves to write blogs on PHP-related topics and presents tutorials on PHP development.

 

Elizabeth Marie Smith

She is an open source advocate and loves to work as a volunteer in many open source projects. She is a public speaker and spoken at many conferences. The mother of four is a mentor for new programmers . She works as a Contributor for PHP from  Oct 2006 – present.

 

 

Cal Evans

Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OS and windows for past 10 years. Cal is married to Kathy and is the father of two. He enjoys and loves to build and manage development teams, using highly imitated management style which he calls “Management by Wandering Around”.

Cal loves to blog at calevans.com and also he is the founder and host of Nomad PHP. He has more than 20 years of working experience. He is also the CEO of E.I.C.C inc , founded Jan 1997.

Chris Cornutt

Chris Cornutt is an active member of PHP community who loves to speak and attend conferences all around the US. He is the author of two sites PHP Developer.org and Joind.in. He organized Dallas-based Lone Star PHP Conference.

He have more than 17 years experience and is currently the Webmaster for PHP Developer.org since Aug 1999 – Present, Senior Editor at Websec.io since Aug 2012 – Present and Application Security Engineer at Pardot since Feb 2015 – Present.

Keith Casey

He is currently working on the platform team at Okta. He loves to play with APIs, their identities, and authentications. His first goal is to give good technology in hands of good people so that they can do good things.

In spare time, he helps to build the Austin tech community. He writes blogs at caseysoftware.com and is fond of monkeys. Also, he is the co-author of book “A Practical Approach to API Design” from Leanpub.

Davey Shafik

Davey has 12 years of experience in Web Development. He is the  Author of php[architect]’s Zend PHP 5 Certification Guide Sitepoint’s PHP Anthology: 101 Tips, Tricks, and Hacks. Also, he wrote Cutting Edge Code, as well as numerous magazine articles.

He is a public speaker and attends many conferences around the world. Davey is the Founding Contributor of Zend Framework, and he is the long-time PEAR contributor. A core feature of PHP 5.3 named PHAR was originally written by Davey Shafik.

Chris Hartjes

Chris is a PHP champion and is developing web applications of every sizes and shapes since 1998. He has more than 20 years experience and right now he currently work as a Senior QA Engineer for Mozilla and a night job to build his own info-product empire through grumpy-learning.com. He is the co-organizer of the True North PHP conference.

 

Lorna Mitchell

Lorna  is the Developer Advocate for IBM Cloud Data Services .She works with the open source database technologies.
Lorna is the author of “PHP Web Services” and “PHP Master” also she is a speaker and writer of a number of outlets.

 

 

Conclusion:

These are some PHP most influential personalities whom you must follow in 2017 so that you can keep yourself up to date about the latest updates on PHP community.  Following them will help you to polish your skills in PHP.

Do you think we missed someone? Share your thoughts with us and spread the love.