Last year at Christmas I posted my original 24 Heroes of PHP™, with a second post listing a further 24 of my heroes at New Year. I’ve decided to repeat the exercise this year, although my list this time is just 11 names. All of these are people that have inspired me in some way or other in 2016.

• Michael Bodanrchuk (@davert)
  Creator of the extremely useful codeception test framework… and a jazz fan.
• Graham Daniels (@greydnls)
  The US Lead of @PHPWomen, who has always been available whenever I’ve needed help.
• Georgiana Gligor (@gbtekkie)
  A great source of advice when working with high access systems, and a good friend when I’ve felt in need of one.
• Andreas Heigl (@heiglandreas)
  Runs the php.ug site, listing PHP user groups, meetups and conferences worldwide; and the phpug slack channel, helping them all talk together.
• Gary Hockin (@GeeH)
  The public face of JetBrains/PHPStorm within the PHP Community, a staunch supporter of OSMI, and all-round nice guy.
• Midori Kocak (@midorikocak)
  For adding the ??= operator to PHP; and for trying to turn DomCode into a music festival 😉
• Mihail Irintchev (@irintchev)
  Organizer of the Bulgaria PHP User Group and Conference (and a great tour guide).
• Cees-Jan Kiewiet (@WyriHaximus)
  Has made available a whole host of useful open source work, including ReactPHP.
• PHPWomen Brasil (@PHPWomenBR)
  Not an individual, but the newest regional group of PHP Women.
• Marco Pivetta (@Ocramius)
  For all his work developing Doctrine (among many other libraries).
• Joe Watkins (@krakjoe)
  For his hard work this year in getting PHP 7.1 to release (alongside Davey Shafik as release managers).

These are just some of my personal heroes, inspirations and role models, I’m sure that you have your own “Heroes of PHP”™; but they all deserve thanks for the time and effort that they devote to improving our lives as PHP developers.

There are many names missing from this “Heroes of PHP”™ list, all deserving of credit: everybody who blogs on the topic, or contributes to open source libraries or frameworks in any way, or helps other developers without asking anything in return is a “Hero of PHP”™. My apologies to all others who contribute to the PHP Community in any way that I haven’t been able to include in this short list.