Phil Sturgeon

Phil has been programming since he was about 12, writing awful messes in spaghetti PHP. 16 years later, he has learned how to a) program in a bunch of other languages, and, b) make PHP be a better place. Years have been shaved off his lifespan fighting to help make better education resources, quality standards, and push new functionality into the core.

Tech startups brought him from Bristol to Newcastle, and finally to New York. WeWork is offering me the chance to work on amazing stuff as a Platform Engineer, where he splits his time between improving legacy services, and green field API development.

Their definition of Platform Engineer is: providing tools, APIs/services and guidelines that help all/many other development teams. It sits between DevOps and Developer Happyness, which makes him happy. They're the oil that keeps the insanely big cogs turning.

The theme of Phil's last few decades has been: taking on complex topics, breaking them down into undersandable chunks, then writing, podcasting, and blogging about it as much as possible. These days it's REST, GraphQL and API Specifications.

I love to teach, and if I'm not speaking at a conference near you, then maybe we can do some remote consulting.