Hello, I’m Brian, the new PHP Developer Evangelist for Stormpath! I’m currently based at home in Dayton, Ohio with my wonderful wife, Heather, and our purebred mutt, Sophie.
My background is not what you would expect: I have a BFA in Communications Arts with a concentration in International Theatre Production (specifically sound design and engineering) from Ohio Northern University. My post-college path started with six months on a cruise ship (doing sound engineering), then writing code for a start-up educational website, then working as a PHP developer and a system administrator and, now, a PHP Developer Evangelist! This job will combine all of the skills I have learned over the years, making it a perfect fit!
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
My jump into computers started even before my love for theatre.
In the early days of the internet, we had an ISP-based webpage. You know, the ones with the /~username on a www2 subdomain of the ISP’s main webpage. Playing around with this (for quite some time), sparked a huge interest in the web. Through college, I dabbled a little bit more in the campus-provided domain and created awesome framed web pages with flashy animated gifs and under construction diggers. Dabbling in WordPress and PHP ensued from there (starting with version 1.2).
In 2006, I registered my first domain, brianretterer.com, where I created a simple WordPress blog to post images and blogposts about my study abroad semester in New Zealand. From that point, I found a love for Wordpress as an accessible website development tool. This love has led to me co-chairing the local Wordpress Meet-up group and co-founding the Dayton, OH Wordcamp.
composer require stormpath/sdk:1.3.0-beta
I first got to know Stormpath when I was looking for a way to manage my users for a weather alerter app I developed, Public Alerter. I hated dealing with the issues of user security, and although there was not much personal information as part of this app, I knew I didn’t want to manage a bunch of other users.
Eventually, the application evolved into a chrome extension, and does not have users. However, being a beta user – and giving the team early feedback – created a relationship with Stormpath that would, ultimately, lead me to working here. A few years after this initial meeting I began to do some freelance work on the PHP SDK. I was enjoying working with the people at Stormpath and was thrilled when I was offered the PHP Developer Evangelist job.
Building the Stormpath PHP Community
What will I be doing as as PHP Developer Evangelist?
In short, I’ll be blogging, speaking, and writing code. While I don’t call myself a writer, I do love to teach people about technology world and the advantages understanding it can give people. I’m looking forward to developing blog posts and letting people know what Stormpath is up to!
All that is true for the speaking aspect as well. Until I started speaking at WordCamps around Ohio, I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed educating and informing people about anything related to the web, designing great systems, and applications. When I learned this job would allow me to grow my audience base and speak about all sorts of amazing nerdy things (as my wife puts it), I was excited to jump at the chance.
Finally, I would definitely call myself a code-writer. I am a self-taught software developer and constantly learning new things; I especially enjoy that programming is a world that is always growing and changing.
With my new role at Stormpath, I will be available to help all the PHP developers use Stormpath’s PHP SDK. I am happy to be working on it and making it a tool that I think everyone who has a webpage or application with a user system will be able to use!
I’ve been welcomed into the Stormpath family and am looking forward to sharing with the world what we are doing here and getting to know all of the PHP Developers out there.
Ways to get ahold of me
- [brian@stormpath.com]
- @bretterer
- fb.com/bretterer
- IRC: Lamarus
- StackOverflow: bretterer
- Github: bretterer
(PS. You may notice a trend here, Most of my user accounts are bretterer)