About Wez

I'm a systems architect from England living in in Maryland, USA. I like to unwind from work with an occasional single malt and a good movie. If I can't get my hands on those, I'll substitute bourbon, bad sci-fi or xbox 360.

I'm married to Juliette and we have a son called Xander. Juliette studies Tae Kwon Do and writing, and Xander attends pre-school and loves numbers.

Professional Biography

Wez Furlong is Director of Engineering at Message Systems (part of the OmniTI family), where he designs new features and refinements for the fastest MTA on Earth. Prior to his time at Message Systems/OmniTI, Wez was the Principal of his own small software consultancy based in England, developing internet and desktop applications for clients as far away as Japan and Australia.

A strong proponent of OpenSource, Wez has made major contributions to the PHP programming language core in the form of the streams and database abstraction layers, and is author of a number of extensions. Wez helps to maintain the php.net server infrastructure and takes an active role in fostering the PHP extension developer community.

Wez enjoys sharing knowledge, and this has manifested in the form of a number of articles for php|architect and PHP Magazine, Oracle Technology Network and IBM developerWorks. He can often be found speaking at PHP and OpenSource conferences worldwide.

Projects and Plans

I've made the observation that most software is pretty crappy and often thought that I could do better. Well, I know that I can, so one of my long term goals is:

1. Identify crappy software areas
2. Think up how to do things better
3. Implement it
4. Since my software is so superior, everyone will end up using it
5. Over time, I will control the world

So far, I've consistenty managed to get to around 2.5, which puts me at roughly the same threat category as Dr. Evil—he never quite seems to take over the world.

I am, or have been, involved in the following projects:

• PHP
  • Active PHPScript - Run PHP inside Windows Scripting Host, ASP and more
  • PECL PHP Extension Library
  • SQLite PHP bindings for SQLite
  • FFI Dynamically load and invoke DSO's and DLL's from PHP
  • Streams API
  • PHP DataObjects API
  • Mailparse Low overhead MIME parser (with a nasty API, I'm sorry!)
  • a bunch of other things I've forgotten
• My profile on SourceForge
• AROS—scary fury animals aside, this is an interesting project.
• Collect Underpants

Interviews

• 30 Minutes with Wez Furlong by Cal Evans at OSCON 2006
• Interview with Wez Furlong by Peter Lavin at php|works 2006

Book Contributions

• Programming PHP, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly)
• PHP Cookbook, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly)

Awards and Nominations

• Oracle Magazine's PHP Developer of the Year 2005.
• Nominee for the ActiveState ActiveAwards 2003 for contributions to the PHP programming language.

Publications

• Connect PHP to DB2 and Cloudscape via PDO (IBM developerWorks)
• The PHP 5 Data Object Abstraction Layer and Oracle (Oracle Technology Network)
• com_dotnet (Zend DevZone)
• php|architect
  • Advanced E-mail Manipulation, May 2004
  • Writing PHP Extensions: Managing Arrays, February 2004
  • Writing PHP Extensions (Cover Feature), January 2004
• PHP Magazine
  • FFI - Funky Function Interface, February 2004
  • SQLite - Swiss Army Knife of Data Storage, October/December 2003
  • Inside PHP, September 2003
  • Ask a Guru - Multiplexing, June 2003
  • News and Trends (uncredited), May 2003
  • Using the Streams API, March/May 2003

Conference Appearances

I have spoken or presented at the following conferences: (or will be)

Zend Conference, Santa Clara, September 2008

PDO: PHP Data Objects

OSCON, Portland, Oregon, July 2008

PDO: PHP Data Objects

Hot Chocolate: Writing Cocoa Apps in PHP

Extending/Embedding PHP

DC PHP Conference, Washington DC, June 2008

Panel: PHP Editor shoot-out

Zend Conference, San Jose, October 2007

Extending/Embedding PHP

Best Mailing Practices

OSCON, Portland, Oregon, July 2007

PDO: PHP Data Objects

Extending/Embedding PHP

php|tek, Chicago, May 2007

PDO: PHP Data Objects

Best Mailing Practices

Microsoft MIX, Las Vegas, 2007

Panel: Can't ASP.NET and PHP just get along?

Zend Conference, San Jose, October 2006

PDO: PHP Data Objects

php|works, Toronto, Canada, September 2006

PDO: PHP Data Objects

Best Mailing Practices

OSCON, Portland, Oregon, July 2006

PDO: PHP Data Objects

MySQL Users Conference, Santa Clara, April 2006

PDO: PHP Data Objects

Forum PHP, Paris, France, November 2005

PDO: PHP Data Objects

Zend Conference, San Francisco, October 2005

PDO: PHP Data Objects

php|works, Toronto, Canada, September 2005

PDO: PHP Data Objects

PHP and COM

PHP Streams (Lucky Dip)

OSCON, Portland, Oregon, August 2005

PDO: PHP Data Objects

php|tropics, Cancun, Mexico, May 2005

PDO: PHP Data Objects

PHP Streams (Lucky Dip)

php|works, Toronto, Canada, September 2004

PDO: PHP Data Objects

PHP and COM

Linux Tag Conference, Karlsruhe, Germany, July 2004

Introducing PECL

PHP|Cruise Conference, Bahamas, March 2004

Writing Socket Applications in PHP

E-Mail Manipulation and Transmission in PHP

Extending PHP

PHP{Con West Conference, Santa Clara, October 2003

Extending PHP

International PHP Conference 2003, Frankfurt, Germany, November 2003

The Revolutionary SQLite

PHP-Irssi - A case study for embedding PHP

Linux Tag Conference, Karlsruhe, Germany, July 2003

SQLite and PHP

International PHP Conference, Spring Edition, Amsterdam, May 2003

Streams and Filters

Copyright Information

All content is © 2003-2008 Wez Furlong unless otherwise attributed.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, except as noted otherwise.