24 PHP Bloggers, Developers, and Podcasts to Follow in 2021

PHP is an essential skill for web developers because most web apps still rely on PHP as their backend. Many frameworks are also developed in PHP, such as Twig. No matter how many languages and frameworks come and go, PHP will never lose its importance. 

Every developer should learn or at least try to learn this beautiful language. To make your learning easy and solve your PHP problems, we’ve highlighted some awesome persons who contribute to the community free of cost. They are using their knowledge to benefit those developers who want to learn PHP but are struggling to learn it. This list is comprised mainly of bloggers, developers, and Podcasts you should follow to help propel you forward on your PHP journey.

Explore PHP Communities for Inspiration, Knowledge, and Connection

Communities are the places where experienced individuals share values and their lifetime knowledge with those who are new and have the enthusiasm to learn and try something new. For example, an open-source community helps devs learn more about open-source, how to contribute there, how to make PRs, and much more. Similarly, there are communities for PHP where experienced individuals share their knowledge with new PHP developers. It is a kind of way of giving back to society from what we have learned yet. Let us talk about those great and selfless developers one by one.

1.  Rob Allen

Rob Allen is the founder of Nineteen feet, which provides consultancy, development, and training to clients interested in APIs. He is a software developer and consultant by profession. His outlets include DevNotes that talks about development in PHP, Swift, Slim Framework, Apache Openwhisk, and the thing he may be interested in. He is also the framework Zen framework in action. Being a graduate of the electronic engineer for the University of Birmingham, he is now the release manager of the Zend Framework Education Advisory board. His blog link: www.akrabat.com

Twitter: @akrabat

GitHub: https://github.com/akrabat

Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/23060/rob-allen

2. Sebastian Bergmann

Sebastian Bergman is an open-source fanatic. As a computer science graduate, he has developed many real-world PHP testing tools that are helping many PHP developers. He has played a vital role in professionalizing PHP software development with PHP. He has shared his valuable experience through many books, blogs, and conferences. Being the Co-founder of The PHP consulting company (thephp.cc), Sebastian has helped his clients with software development.

He is also the founder of PHPUnit, a very efficient and industry-leading testing tool that integrates with most common PHP frameworks and CMS platforms.

Website: http://sebastian-bergmann.de/

Twitter: @s_bergmann

GitHub: https://github.com/sebastianbergmann

3. Jordi Boggiano

Jordi Boggiano is the founder of Nelmio, a web development firm from Switzerland. Jordi has been in web development since 2000. His most work is towards open-source development, JavaScript, ActionScript, PHP programming, and learning more about how the web framework works actually. Jordi mostly belongs to Belgium, who came to Switzerland for higher studies. For a few years, he worked at Liip to gain experience and appear at conferences. He then went on to start Nelmio, after collaborating with Piere in 2011.

He has been the core team member of many famous PHP frameworks like Composer, Symphony2, and BackboneJs.

Blog: http://seld.be/

Twitter: @seldaek

GitHub: https://github.com/Seldaek

4. Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert is a successful entrepreneur and PHP specialist. Dries is the founder and project lead of Drupal. Drupal is a CMS tool for web developers and web designers, making life very easy for them. Drupal is one the leading CMS in the market, with almost 2% of the world’s websites on the internet. 

Dries is the CTO of Acquia, another open-source that leverages the Drupal CMS. Acquia has more than 100 employees and helps many other prominent organizations and companies.

Dries has completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from Ghent University.

Blog: http://buytaert.net/

Twitter: @Dries

5. Angela Byron

Angela Byron is the senior director of product and community management at Acquia. She was awarded the Google-O'Reilly Open 2008 Source Award for Best Contributor; also the co-author of the O'Reilly book "Using Drupal.” Her story with Drupal started when she completed the Google summer of code from Drupal. After that, she has been contributing to open-source with all her energy. Her main works in Drupal include reviewing Patches, enhancing user experience in Drupal, testing the software, coordinating decision making, and maintaining proper documentation of the work.

Angela is from Vancouver, British Columbia. You may find her playing video games, solving puzzles, or finding awesome work to do in town with her friends in her free time.

Blog: http://www.webchick.net/

Twitter: @webchick

6. Anthony Ferrara

Anthony Ferrara is an object-oriented language fanatic and expert in application architecture, web application security, and PHP internals. He is the CTO at Lingo Live, a language coaching firm, and has developed more secure password APIs in PHP 5.5. Anthony is also a great writer, and his writing mainly involves web security in the PHP ecosystem, instructional videos on PHP, and various tutorials of different PHP frameworks. Currently, at the time of writing this article, he is the Director of engineering at Grovvo.

Blog: http://blog.ircmaxell.com/

Twitter: @ircmaxwell

Google+: https://plus.google.com/+AnthonyFerrara/posts

GitHub: https://github.com/ircmaxell

7. Ed Finkler

Ed Finkler is a passionate developer and has started working on a website from the very beginning. He works on both the front and back-end sides in python, PHP, and javascript and has developed many websites. He is the head developer at Graph Story and hosts the Development podcast with Hartjes, an important person on the Fictive kin software engineering and design collective team. 

Talking about Ed’s past works, he has also served as a web lead and security researcher at the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University. Ed is a very community-friendly person and always wants to give back to the community; that is why he helps people with mental issues in the technical community by spreading awareness through various conferences and campaigns. Ed is also known as Funkatron, and you can read more of his writing on Funkatron.com.

Blog: http://funkatron.com/

Twitter: @funkatron

Google+: https://plus.google.com/104166226221361877073/posts

GitHub: https://github.com/funkatron

 8. Sara Golemon

As a developer, you’ve probably used or at least know about MongoDB; Sara is currently a platform engineer at MongoDB. She is also the core developer and release manager at PHP 7.2. She has been helping to develop PHP standard recommendations as a core committee member of the PHP framework interoperability group. She is also the author of extending and embedding PHP (2014, with online updates), a fully dedicated guide for writing PHP extensions in C/C++. Being a contributor in multiple of various PHP runtime, she also created the first formal PHP specification.

Blog: http://blog.golemon.com

Twitter: @SaraMG

GitHub: https://github.com/sgolemon

9. Andi Gutmans

Andi Gutmans is the co-creator of PHP 3 and Zend Engine, the technology which is the pillar of PHP 4, and directed the development of PHP 5 and PHP 7. Andi is also the co-founder of Zend technologies, which was later overtaken by Rogue wave software. Andi was originally born in Switzerland. During his studies at the Israel Institute of technology, he and his friend Zeev created PHP 3, and then after that, both wrote Zend ( Zend is the combination of Zeev and Andi). It becomes a foundation for future releases like PHP5 and PHP7. He was also a member of The Apache Software Foundation, and currently, he is general manager of Amazon web services.

Blog: http://blog.zend.com/author/andi/

Twitter: @andigutmans

10. Emma Jane Hogbin

Emma Jane Hogbin is a technology lover and highly active in the Drupal and Bazaar Version control system. She has spoken at various tech events and social topics as well. Being a member of Ubuntu women, Emma always encourages women to collaborate and create new software rather than just using GNU/LINUX software. She is a big supporter of women in tech and open source and formulated a law named “Unicorn Law”, which states that “if you are a woman in open source, you will eventually give a talk about being a woman in open source”_source.

Currently, Hogbin runs a service business that provides education and web development services, named HICK Tech. She is a technical content writer for the Full Circle Magazine and co-authored the book Front End Drupal.  

She has also been in service under the Canadian Department of Foreign and National Affairs. In her free time, you can find Emma enjoying crafting.

Website: http://emmajane.net/index.html

Twitter: @emmajanehw

GitHub: https://github.com/emmajane

11. Alena Holligan

Alena started her career in fine art and then moved to graphic design. After going through various phases of her career, she found programming as his passion 15 years ago. Her specialist topics are php, security, and WordPress. Alena is passionate about creating a strong community and spreading her knowledge to empower and boost the confidence of new PHP users. Currently, a teacher at Treehouse for PHP and a leader for women who code.

Twitter: @alenaholligan

GitHub: https://github.com/sketchings

Website: http://sketchings.com/

12. Rasmus Lerdorf

Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish-Canadian programmer, created the first-ever version of PHP language and co-authored PHP 2. He also led development teams in releasing future versions of PHP. The team included Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski. 

Rasmus’s career started with Yahoo Inc as an infrastructure architect engineer. In 2010, he joined wePay for the development of their application programming interfaces. In 2012 he joined Etsy, and in 2013 joined Jelastic to help them with works on various technologies.

Blog: http://toys.lerdorf.com/

Twitter: @rasmus

GitHub: https://github.com/rlerdorf

13. Tobias Nyholm

Currently working at Happyr.com, Tobias has spent many years working on web development projects. He is also a certified Symfony developer, co-host of The Sound of Symfony podcast, a core team member of Symfony, and author of php[architect] and Sitepoint.

At Hppyr.com, he works to continually advance their hiring software. He always looks for opportunities for sharing his knowledge, experiences, and journey. He has worked on many projects like PHP-Cache, PHP-Geocoder,  HTTPlug, Guzzle, and much more.

Website: http://tnyholm.se/

Twitter: @tobiasnyholm

GitHub: https://github.com/Nyholm

14. Matthew Weier O’Phinney

Matthew is the principal engineer at Zend and the current project lead at Zend framework, the Apigility(API builder written in PHP), and Expressive(middleware microframework). He is a great software developer, PHP expert, and standards developer.

Blog: https://mwop.net/blog/

Twitter: @mwop

GitHub: https://github.com/weierophinney

15. Taylor Otwell

Taylor Otwell is a great software and PHP developer at Laravel. He primarily worked on three technologies in Laravel, and one is Spark (standard readymade components for fast application development), Forge (for automating server deployment and configuration), and Envoyer (Comprehensive application development system). 

Blog: http://taylorotwell.com/

Twitter: @taylorotwell

GitHub: https://github.com/taylorotwell

16. Nikita Popov

Nikita Popov is currently a Computer Science and Physics student and contributing some wonderful technologies to the community. His main contributions include PHP-Parsers(PHP Parse written in PHP), FastRoute(fast request router for PHP), and assistance to future releases of php.

Twitter: @nikita_ppv

GitHub: https://github.com/nikic

Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/385378/nikic

17. Fabien Potencier

Fabien is the co-founder and CEO of Sensio labs, an expert in PHP and Symfony. Currently, he is working on Symfony, an open-source PHP framework project and the project lead of Symfony, an open-source business based on Symfony projects, and CEO of blackfire.io, an application testing platform written in PHP.

Blog: http://fabien.potencier.org

Twitter: @fabpot

GitHub: https://github.com/fabpot

18. Derick Rethans

Derick Rethans is a top-notch PHP developer and author of Xdebug, a highly used PHP debugging tool. He is also the PHP engineer and evangelist at MongoDB. Contribute in PHP 4.4/7.4, authored php|architect's Guide to Date and Time Programming, and PHP 5 power programming. He used to work as an independent contractor and PHP extensions and related projects. 

Blog: http://derickrethans.nl

Twitter: @derickr

GitHub: https://github.com/derickr

15. Lukas Smith

Lukas Kahwe Smith is a part of the development team at Liip, a Swiss software company. His PHP expertise is in Backend architecture, database operations, and various open-source libraries. He also co-managed the PHP 5.3 release and currently leads the Symfony project. You can find him playing frisbee in his free time.

Blog: http://pooteeweet.org/

Twitter: @lsmith

GitHub: https://github.com/lsmith77

16. Margaret Staples

Margaret Staples is the developer evangelist at Twilio and one of the most influential speakers at the PHP community conference circuit. She also likes to write about code, philosophy, and attitude.

Blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog/author/mstaples

Twitter: @dead_lugosi

GitHub: https://github.com/mstaples

17. Juan Treminio

Juan is a Texas-based web developer having 16+ years of experience and an expert in APIs, DevOps, deployment, automated testing, and more. He is the creator of puPHPet, a GUI configurator for the Vagrant automation tool meant to simplify the provisioning of virtual environments. 

Blog: https://jtreminio.com/blog/

Twitter: @juantreminio

GitHub: https://github.com/jtreminio

Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/446766/juan-treminio

18. Jonathan Wage

Jonatha Wage was the former CTO of opensky.com, a company acquired by Alibaba Group, and now is the CTO of MedTrainer, the creator of the only all-in-one compliance management suite. He is also an active contributor at many PHP libraries related to database and object mapping at Symfony.

Blog: https://jwage.com/blog/

Twitter: @jwage

GitHub: https://github.com/jwage

19. David Walsh

David Walsh is a 33-year-old senior software engineer and evangelist at Mozilla. A renowned conference and meetup speaker at events such as London AJAX, AustinJS, BrazilJS, Snow*Mobile. Founder of Script and Style, Wynq Web Labs, and core developer of Moto Tool javascript framework and numerous Moto-Tool plugins. Talking about his past experiences, he was a software engineer at SitePen, a consultant for best buy, zone moderator at DZone, and documentation contributor at Dojo Toolkit.

Blog: http://davidwalsh.name/

Twitter: @davidwalshblog

GitHub: https://github.com/darkwing

19. Freek Van der Herten

Freek is the co-founder of Spatie, where most of the development is carried on in open source software like Ubuntu, PHP, Laravel, Composer, etc. He is an experienced PHP and Laravel developer. He has founded many packages in PHP, Laravel, and javascript with his colleagues, and they all have great download records.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/freekmurze

Github: https://github.com/freekmurze

Blog: https://freek.dev/

20. Jeffrey Way

Jeffrey Way is the founder of Laracasts, an education website for Laravel, Vue, HTML, CSS, and the different stack of web developers. Jeffrey spends most of his time while digging into cutting-edge technologies and teaching complicated concepts.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way

21. Graham Campbell 

Graham Campbell is a prominent PHP developer and founder of StyleCI, a code style fixing integration service. He is also an open-source fanatic and member of the Cachet core team. He is also a member of Laravel framework and maintainer of various Laravel and PHP packages under multiple organizations such as GrahamCampbell, vlucas, opis, thephpleague, php-build, CachetHQ, StyleCI, ClassPreloader, laravel-auto-presenter, AltThree, DigitalOceanPHP, GitLabPHP, and BitbucketPHP, and FakerPHP with more than 17 million downloads. 

Email: hello@gjcampbell.co.uk

22. Lucas Michot 

Currently, the senior staff engineer at Shopify, Lucas Michot, is an experienced web developer and likes to build robust web applications. Lucas has various sets of skills such as SEO, project management, excellence across multiple tech stacks such as Laravel, PHP, JAMStack, GraphQL, RESTAPIs, etc. 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasmichot/?originalSubdomain=de

23. Mohamed Said

Mohamed Said is an experienced PHP, Laravel developer, and Full-stack developer. Said to help other developers by writing blogs, creating videos, giving them tutorials, etc. The path to random thoughts collection is https://themsaid.com/journal.

Blog: https://themsaid.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/themsaid

Githu: https://github.com/themsaid

24. Fongoh Martin 

Fongoh Martin is both a mobile and web developer. He is the founder and maintainer of Digital Renter, which helps people find houses for rent and accommodation easily. His side passion is mentoring future minds in different mobile and web tech stacks. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fongohmartin

Final Words

The communities are growing day by day, whether PHP, Node, Ruby, or another tech stack. Many great developers contribute to these communities to make it easier for up and comers to learn technology and real-world problems. These are just a few of them; many other developers are helping us with their videos, content, or software. 

Share this article with your friends if you think they should also know about these great resources to follow. Happy coding.