We are happy to introduce you David Buchmann. He is one of the core developers of the Jackalope implementation of PHPCR and he works hard to make the Symfony Content   Management Framework happen.

He will give a session at phpDay called “Step By Step: Making a website fly with Assetic, Varnish and ESI”  Friday 18th May at 2:30 pm on track 3.

The Interview:

Things that you consider before choosing a framework for a project?
* how long is the project supposed to stay on line?
* which tools does my team already know?
* is this more a project with standard cases and some customization (we want a feature-rich framework and customize it) or is it highly custom (we take a lower level framework and build custom things on top of it)

What should I learn next?
The Symfony2 SonataAdminBundle

What are your thoughts about functional programming?
I had courses on scheme at university, but its darn hard to really think functional. just passing around callbacks and having closures is not functional programming.

Who’s your programming hero?
Fabien Potentier

What features would you like to see in the next PHP version?
More documentation for the chapters that lack documentation.

Who killed JFK?
Not me :->

What do you think about php 5.4 traits?
Interesting idea but I have yet to try them out.

What do you like and what not about php?
The weak typing and no compilers make it so fast do develop. it is made for the web. the language is really maturing and getting rid (or at least deprecating) stupid things.
There are great frameworks like Symfony2 evolving, without getting the bloatedness of the java world.
What I like less is the inconsistency in basic methods names or parameter order.

Which opensource projects are you following the most?
Symfony2, Jackalope.

Did your love for programming cause you some troubles with your partner?
Nah, she is happy to have somebody who can not only fix her computer but also create her a homepage :-)

Suggest a book to read.
David Brin – Postman.
Or did you mean a tech book? I have not red any printed tech book last year, it’s all in the internets :-)

You can find David on twitter (@dbu) .

 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.