About Theodore R. Smith | users.phpexperts.pro

Theodore R. Smith

At a glance:

Contact:

Email
Skype: php.pro
Cell: 832-303-9477

Hi, I'm Theodore R. Smith.

I'm a PHP expert and enthusiast. I'm a Zend Certified PHP 5 Engineer as well as a MySQL 5 Certified Developer and DBA. I'm also pretty skilled at PostgreSQL.

You may already have used my work if you are a reddit regular. I created and maintain the RedditMirror. Go ahead and click on one of the links, then pick an image (usually any image), copy and paste the URL into Notepad and see what the path is.

PHP University

Since October 2009, I have decided to take decisive action against a verifiable lack of education of PHP programmers in general. While I see most others systemically complaining, I created the PHP University, so that I can mentor PHP developers to become the most efficient and expert craftsmen of the Object Oriented trade as I can.

In my spare time over the last two plus years, I have crafted a series of instructional lessons in the form of open sourced projects, designed mainly for aspiring Craftsmen (people who love their trade and view coding as an artform, choosing beauty over speed or utility). While it is still in a preliminary alpha stage, I believe it to be a solid reflection of just part of my technical mastery of PHP, OOP and other concepts.

The PHP University Repository now contains eleven projects with over 55,000 lines of code.

2011-2012

From February 2011 through August 2012, I worked for Hearst Digital News.

From January 2012 through August 2012, I was the lead senior developer, and Architect, of HDN's entire blog platform (Wordpress and Drupal), arguably the 4th largest blogging network in the world, and the confirmed 2nd largest Wordpress network (outside of wordpress.com, itself), in terms of both traffic and number of blogs. I am also its build manager, and automated test programmer. Every day, I manage thousands of blogs that receive many millions of page views for blogs including SFGate's DailyDish, the Houston Chronicle's blogs, etc.

I decided to end my contract in August 2012 after the redesign and migration of the Chron.com blogs to focus full-time on training people how to program, which is a strong passion of mine.

Until January 2012, I was a member of the Core team for their entire newspaper platform, Every day I program and deal with sites that cumulatively receive millions upon millions of requests, including the Houston Chronicle, My San Antonio, and SFGate.

2010-2011

From March 2010 through February 2011, I worked for SpeedFC in Dallas, TX, as the Team Lead of their Internet Retail Platform (~99% of the model and 50% of the controller of all of their ecommerce platforms). In that proficiency, I orchestrated cross-team development, mentored and partially managed the large outsourced team (40+ outsourced developers) and taught on a professional basis the senior American developers how to be more proficient in coding. I personally managed the 2011 YankeeCandle.com relaunch as well as the relaunch of the now-defunct AnchorBlue.com. I was "most senior" mentor for TheLimited.com and did the bulk of all speed improvements and arhictectural redesign, including the multiple address shipping systems, for a few dozen corporations, including ShopKo.com, DressBarn, and The Limited.

2009-2010

Prior to SpeedFC, I worked as a contractor for the U.S. Marines Corp., and among other things as a Systems Engineer (documented and then optimized their Software Development Lifecycle) for the entire JWT North America. My main project in my contract was an ultra-secure Single-Sign On system for the U.S. Marines and other branches of the armed forces.

An Early Beginner

I've always had a passion for computers and started coding by the time I was 10 in BASIC; my first app: QNibbles. I move on to C then C++ then PERL by the time I was 13. I started with PHP back in 1996 — 15 years ago — when I was 14, when it was called Personal Home Page / FI (I think that meant Form Interpreter). PHP/FI for short.

My First Open Source PHP Project

I was an early member of SourceForge and one of my first open sourced applications, PHP-Egg won several awards and designations in 2001 for being 1) the most advanced non-GUI PHP application outside of PHP-GTK at the time and 2) being the first truly PHP-based daemon, since it was designed (using PHP 3, none the less!) to be multiprocessed daemon that understood the IRC RFC completely as both a client and a server.

From 1998 until 2002, PHP-Egg was used to successfully maintain control of multiple channels in Undernet, which classically lacks ChanServ, and used the new MySQL 3.x as an engine. I developed one fo the first true P2P clients, as PHP-Egg would gather people's MP3 log files, and allow anyone to search anyone's share files. PHP-Egg would then initiate DCC connections on one's behalf to the host that had the file. This was back in 1999-2002. At its height (while Napster was still in diapers), my own instance of PHP-Egg indexed over 5 TB of files across Undernet, Efnet, and DALNet. Querying these millions of records, by thousands of active users at once, gave me valuable experience on both flash traffic and highly-optimized SQL strategies and DBA design at the ripe age of around 18.

The xMule Era

In 2003, I was fundamentally involved in the port of eMule onto the cross-platform wxWidgets framework, providing 1st class C++ GUI P2P to Linux, *BSDs, and the then-nascent MacOSX. The project was called xMule and while it no longer supports the latest ED2K servers, there are still loyal users in China and Iran who utilize the encrypted and decentralized chat services and also share files. The xMule proejct is dedicated to the preservation of rare cultural content and was designed to operate stand-alone and as its own ED2K server, so multiple xMules can form autonomous, secret servers that are ideal for operating clandestinely in rogue regimes which do not value freedom of information.

Hi. I'm Theodore Smith, and I'd love to help you understand PHP (and software engineering) better!

2012-01-18

PHP Expert