Matthew Weier O'Phinney has spent the last ten years of his career working for Zend as a part of their Zend Framework team. In this post to his site he looks back over the years, how it all started and where he is today.

10 years ago, as I write this, I was on a plane from Burlington, VT, to San Jose, CA, where I'd be starting work at Zend Technologies the next day as a PHP Developer.

He talks about where he started out at Zend (the eBiz team) and the kind of work he was given. It was early on that he started working with an internal, new project at the time: Zend Framework. He looks at some of his early contributions to the project and his "trial by fire" when he was asked to help give a tutorial about it at that year's ZendCon. He also mentions some of the people he's worked with along the way and gives thanks to the founding Zend team. Zend Framework was one of the first major frameworks out there and paved the way for the framework-driven environment we find ourselves in now. With Zend Framework v2 it encouraged a component-based system that spread quickly across the entire PHP community. Thank you Matthew for all of your hard work over the years, not just in the Zend Framework ecosystem but in the PHP community as a whole.

Congratulations go out to Derick Rethans for the outstanding work he's done on XDebug for the last ten years. From his latest blog post:

Today it has been ten years since the first release of Xdebug: version 0.7.0. I would like to celebrate this tenth anniversary with a new release: Xdebug 2.2.0. Xdebug 2.2 adds support for PHP 5.4 and provides some new features.

There's five new things on his list of updates in this latest release:

• Colours on the command line
• Better support for closures in stack and function traces
• The size of arrays is now shown with the overloaded variable output
• Added the method call type to xdebug_get_function_stack
• Extra information to error printouts to tell that the error suppression operator has been ignored due to xdebug.scream

If you've found XDebug handy for testing and finding those tough to track bugs over the years, you should consider buying "support" to show Derick your appreciation (oh, and you also get a "first in" preference on your XDebug questions)!