The Life and Times of Michael Shadle

The PHP team deserves all the kudos in the world. I love PHP, and for the most part PHP has loved me. Between the four of these guys, you've got a large portion of PHP, Xdebug, APC and countless other related projects and modules. They've made web development a joy for me, when I don't have to write for lame projects that is.

Their personal websites: http://lerdorf.com/ (Rasmus), http://derickrethans.nl/ (Derick), http://netevil.org/ (Wez), http://ilia.ws/ (Ilia)

Steven has spearheaded a lot of great work with the memcached project. Not only that, but his insights on the mailing list have been interesting to read. Steven and his team at Facebook have made great improvements to the memcached project and have also helped with various PHP related modules (APC for instance.) Of course, it is always fun to read more information about their architecture too.