PHP Founders : Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans, Zeev Suraski

1. Rasmus Lerdorf

Rasmus Lerdorf (born November 22, 1968 in Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland) is a Danish-Greenlandic programmer
and is most notable as the creator of the PHP programming language. He authored the first two versions.
Rasmus also participated in the development of later versions of PHP led by a group of developers including
Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, who later founded Zend Technologies.

In 1993 he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering.
Since September 2002, he has been employed by Yahoo! Inc. as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer.

PHP started out as a personal project of Rasmus Lerdorf. Originally called “Personal Home Page Tools”,
PHP’s first 2 versions were authored by Rasmus. Future versions have been core developed by many,
but of course Rasmus is still well involved in development and the community. He is currently employed by Yahoo,
an extremely PHP friendly employer. This offers him much opportunity to still be quite active in all areas that are PHP.
He is constantly invited to conferences around the world.

2. Andi Gutmans

Andi Gutmans is an Israeli programmer with Swiss roots, PHP developer and co-founder of Zend Technologies.
A graduate of the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Gutmans and fellow student Zeev Suraski created PHP 3 in 1997.
In 1999 they wrote the Zend Engine, the core of PHP 4, and founded Zend Technologies, which has since overseen PHP advances,
including the current PHP 5 release. The name Zend is a portmanteau of their forenames, Zeev and Andi.

Gutmans currently leads product strategy at Zend Technologies including the open-source Zend Framework project.
He has participated at Zend in its corporate financing and also works with vendors like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.

Gutmans is also a board member of the Eclipse Foundation (which he joined in October 2005),
an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation, and was nominated for the FSF Award for the
Advancement of Free Software in 1999.

In 2004 he wrote a book called "PHP 5 Power Programming" together with Stig Bakken and Derick Rethans.

Gutmans was recognized by ComputerWorld magazine in July 2007 in their article
“40 Under 40: 40 Innovative IT People to Watch, Under the Age of 40.”


3. Zeev Suraski

Zeev Suraski is an Israeli programmer, PHP developer and co-founder of Zend Technologies.
A graduate of the Technion, Haifa, Suraski and fellow student Andi Gutmans created PHP 3 in 1997.
In 1999 they wrote the Zend Engine, the core of PHP 4, and founded Zend Technologies, which has since overseen PHP advances.
The name Zend is a portmanteau of their forenames, Zeev and Andi.

Zeev Suraski is a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and was nominated for the FSF Award for the
Advancement of Free Software in 1999. Zeev Suraski is the CTO for Zend Technologies.

Zeev, what tips do you have for a beginner using PHP?

There are lots of gotcha's that can be avoided if one follows a few rules.
First - always enable E_NOTICE's while you're developing/debugging.
Make your code E_NOTICE-clean, and you'd be likely to produce code of much higher quality.