Summary: Stephan Hochdörfer from bitExpert AG and I got the chance to sit down and chat in the event hotel lobby following his session (and my keynote address :-) at SymfonyLive Berlin, 2014. Surprisingly, this podcast contains "the s-word" once. You have been warned. :-) Why PHP? Despite this very positive statement, "I discovered PHP and stuck with it because it helps me solve my problems on a daily basis," when we got to this part of Stephan's history in open source, his tone got a little defensive. This is something I hear every now and again in the PHP community. I would figure at the point when PHP, as part of the LAMP Stack, is running around 80% of the Internet, nobody has anything to be ashamed of. Stephan then brought up something interesting and different about PHP community culture that, for me, hold a clue to PHP's success: "I've been to a few conferences where I was treated like the 'stupid guy' because I do PHP and I show PHP examples on my slides, so people didn't get the point of my presentation. Maybe I did it wrong, but that was really weird to see. When you are at a PHP conference and you talk about other technologies, we are quite open. It's weird to see and experience it the other way around." Composer and migrating proprietary PHP to open source "Back when we started the company, I did what all people did [at the time], like writing their own frameworks [or CMSs!]. Unfortunately, we are still sticking with that because we have lots of customers and projects out there. But slowly, and especially thanks to Composer", we're trying to get rid of a lot of stuff and replace it with open source implementations," from the Symfony2 framework and elsewhere, thereby removing risk from his own business. Stephan also promises to open source the good stuff he and his colleagues have built. :-) Guest dossier Name: Stephan Hochdörfer Twitter: @shochdoerfer Blog: http://blog.bitexpert.de/blog/ Work affiliation: Principal at bitExpert AG, Mannheim, Germany: "Whatever's possible with the web, we do it." LinkedIn profile GitHub: shochdoerfer When/which PHP you started with: "A really early version of PHP 4." Here are some conference session videos in which Stephan talks PHP ... well mostly dependency injection :-) The 7 Deadly Sins of Dependency Injection – PHP UK Conference 2014 The state of Dependency Injection in PHP – Dutch PHP Conference 2012 Separating the concerns - with Joshua Thijssen, Dutch PHP Conference 2012 Real World Dependency Injection – phpday 2011 Video!
