August 25th, 2009

A as in August and X as in Xdebug. Written by core developer Derick Rethans, Xdebug has grown to be a powerful toolset for both the savvy and new PHP developer. This month we're pleased to have power user Gennady Feldman speak on making the most with Xdebug.

Xdebug is a Swiss army knife of PHP extensions and a must have for any PHP developer and provides invaluable functionality out of the box. We'll cover some of Xdebug's greatest and often overlooked features, as well as it's best known value as a profiler and debugger. Gennady will also share some of his personal tips and tricks for getting the most out of Xdebug, including how to find where your performance bottlenecks are and tracking down where a particular function gets called and/or included from.

Gennady has been programming since the age of thirteen. He was always fascinated with computers and trying to make them do cool stuff. Over the years a personal hobby became a professional career and Gennady started coding php over six years ago. Current challenges include learning best practices, and finding answers to scalability and performance issues. In his spare time Gennady is also an Open Source contributor. He has contributed to BusyBox, Miranda IM and libyahoo2. Gennady also maintains a personal website where people can download free software and read his blog. Gennady is also a regular on the #phpc channel and tries his best to attend NYPHP and NYMySQL user group meetings. The rest of the time is spent with his wife, family and friends.

Thank you to IBM for providing a great presentation space in Midtown Manhattan. As a service to our community, New York PHP Community meetings are always free and open to the public.