We are happy to introduce you Lukas Smith, an experienced PHP developer, he spends most of his time playing with Symfony2 as well as pushing the PHPCR ecosystem.

He will give a session at phpDay called “PHPCR – PHP Content Repository Specification” Friday 18th May at 5:30 pm on track 2.

The Interview:

Things that you consider before choosing a framework for a project?
As I work in a web agency, the main criteria is does it cover the common use cases. Does it do this in a way that facilitates code reuse and testing?
Furthermore how strong is the community in producing quality extensions and supporting each other?

What should i learn next?
PHPCR :)

What are your throughts about functional programming?
Its been a while since I have taken a serious look at functional programming. Back in University we learned Opal. I loved the beauty of the final solutions, but dreaded refactoring.

Who’s your programming hero?
My father. I still remember when we got this weird Apricot computer and he wrote an english word trainer in Basic. I “played” with it all day :)

What features would you like to see in the next PHP version?
Getting interfaces for common stuff like caching, logging, http request/response etc.

What’s the average beer per hour factor during conferences and a normal hangout?
0.0

What do you think about php 5.4 traits?
I would have preferred Grafts (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/horizontalreuse#grafts_-_class_composition_not_implemented)
We still have a lot of learning to do, but it has the potential of becoming a very significant tool for PHP developers.

What do you like and what not about php?
I like that so far I never felt that a problem I needed to solve required me to program in another language.

Which opensource projects are you following the most?
Symfony2 and PHPCR .. though I guess these days also Drupal, despite having never used it, let alone installed it :)

Suggest a book to read.
I know SQL is not hip these days, but “SQL Performance Tuning” by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer was probably the most important book for my career. I learned so much, which gave me the confidence to really step up and from there I was able to grow my knowledge in every direction I needed to go.

You can reach Lukas on twitter(@lsmith) and on his blog.