About
About
Davey Shafik is a full-time developer with over 20 years of experience as a technical polyglot with a focus on PHP and related technologies. He is a Staff Engineer at BlackCart and has written four books, numerous articles, and spoken at conferences the world over. He is best known for his books, the Zend PHP Certification Study Guide and PHP Master: Write Cutting Edge Code
Davey is the creator of PHP Archive (PHAR), included with PHP 5.3 by default and is the Release Manager for PHP 7.1.
Davey is passionate about improving the tech community. He co-organizes the Prompt initiative (mhprompt.org), dedicated to lifting the stigma surrounding mental health discussions.
Resume
Resume
Experience
Sep 2019 - January 2021
During my time at Lyft, I was responsible for defining team direction, priority, and scope with the goal of improving developer productivity. I have been primarily focused on gathering and distilling customer feedback down for product teams, and ensuring adoption of new features and products.
As part of this role I was responsible for launching internal developer marketing communications at Lyft, ensuring that we brought Lyft‘s personality and excitement with our customers back to our own employees to raise awareness and drive adoption.
In addition, I was responsible for driving down cloud developer environment costs and helping to migrate developers from a bespoke development environment to one built on common best practices and open tooling for Python and Golang.
Jul 2015 - Sep 2019
As a Developer Evangelist at Akamai, I have been tasked with educating customers and potential customers about our APIs, and how to integrate Akamai products at even level of the stack — from devops, to frontend.
During my time there I have focused heavily on HTTP/2 and new web architectures, including contributing better HTTP/2 support to both the PHP curl extension, and Ruby Curb gem, as well as contributions to Python’s Hyper H2 project.
To help bring Akamai automation into the existing workflows of developers (“to meeting them where they live”), I lead the effort to build multiple third-party integrations, including Terraform, and WordPress.
In addition I envisioned, architected, built, and lead the efforts around Akamai CLI which brings a consistent developer and user experience to Akamai’s products via the command-line.
With Akamai CLI, I was responsible for building the primary command line interface in Golang, including a meta package manager, and secure self-updating capabilities, creating UX/DX guidelines including a complete UI Style Guide, and working with other teams to design, build, and review additional sub-tools written in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Golang.
Apr 2013 - Jun 2015
As a community engineer for Engine Yard, I have been involved in many aspects of our marketing and product initiatives including helping develop ROI metrics for developer relations, and go to market strategy based on community feedback and observation. I have been involved in producing marketing messaging and materials for both the PHP community and the general tech community.
My primary role has been representing Engine Yard at conferences by informing potential customers about our products, as well as speaking at most. In addition, I am responsible for in-depth and blog technical content, podcasts and organizing the Engine Yard developer conference, Distill.
Additionally, I have been active in numerous open source projects as well as participating in our social media initiatives.
Oct 2011 - Apr 2013
As an engineer for Engine Yard, I was responsible for creating and maintaining public and internal APIs, orchestrating Amazon AWS infrastructure and managing PHP-based systems. Additionally, I was involved in maintaining the Orchestra PHP Cloud application management web console and creating new features for the platform, such as SSL and support for PHP 5.4.
In addition to my engineering duties, I wrote documentation, blog posts and have represented Engine Yard by speaking at conferences all over the globe.
Mar 2005 - Sep 2011
During my time at Digital Architecture, I was responsible for a major re-write of the entire Acalog™ ACMS™ Academic Catalog Management System. From it’s humble PHP 3-based roots, it has now become a fully fledged object oriented “Web 2.0” web application. Utilizing PHP 5, JavaScript (including complex AJAX-based UIs) and web services, Acalog™ has become the de-facto way of managing online academic catalogs.
Due to the contractual nature of the academic catalog, we face many data integrity challenges; needing to ensure accurate “creation-to-user” processes; which feature revision and rich text change tracking abilities.
From advising the CTO on the direction of the product to working with systems administration staff on implementation of environment. I am primarily responsible for creating both usable intuitive user interfaces and designing the back-end architecture and database structures to power them with an emphasis on ease of use for further new development, maintenance and exposing as web services.
Publications
Upgrading to PHP 7
O'Reilly Media
2015
Upgrading to PHP 7 is a comprehensive guide on changes to PHP in PHP 7, published by O’Reilly Media, Inc.
This 70 page book covers everything you need to know to migrate your legacy code to PHP 7, and to get started using all the new features.
Zend PHP Certification Study Guide
php[architect]
2015
The Zend PHP Certification Study Guide (3rd Edition), edited and produced by the publishers of php[architect], provides the most comprehensive and thorough preparation tool for developers who wish to take the exam. This book provides complete coverage of every topic that is part of the exam, including:
- Strings and Patterns (including regular expressions)
- Web Programming
- Object-oriented Programming
- Object-oriented Design
- Database Programming
- XML and Web Services
- Security
- Streams and Network Programming