Rasmus Lerdorf (Danish: [ˈleɐ̯ˌtɒˀf]; born November 22, 1968) is a Danish-Canadian programmer. He helped create and played a key role in starting the PHP programming language. He wrote the first two versions of the language and worked with other programmers to develop later versions. These programmers included Jim Winstead (who later created blo.gs), Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski. He continues to help with the project today.

Early life and education

Rasmus Lerdorf was born on Disko Island in Greenland and moved to Denmark during his childhood. His family later moved to Canada from Denmark in 1980 and relocated to King City, Ontario, in 1983. He graduated from King City Secondary School in 1988 and earned a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 1993. He worked on the Apache HTTP Server and added the LIMIT clause to the mSQL database management system. A different version of the LIMIT clause had already been used for a decade in large computer systems, such as Oracle Rdb running on VMS, originally made by Digital Equipment Corporation. However, this feature had not yet been used in newer personal computer-based databases. Later, other SQL-compatible database management systems adopted the LIMIT clause. In 1995, he released the first version of PHP.

Career

From September 2002 to November 2009, Lerdorf worked for Yahoo! Inc. as an engineer who helped build systems for the company. In 2010, he began working for WePay to create a software tool that allows other programs to communicate with their system. During 2011, he advised several new companies on how to improve their technology. On February 22, 2012, he shared on Twitter that he had started working for Etsy. In July 2013, he joined Jelastic as a senior advisor to help them develop new technology.

Lerdorf often speaks at conferences about open source software. At the OSCMS 2007 conference, he gave a main speech where he explained security problems in each project presented that year.

He also spoke at the WeAreDevelopers Conferences in 2017 and 2019. During these events, he talked about the history of PHP, the release of PHP 7 in 2017, and the 25 years of development in PHP.

Award

In 2003, Lerdorf was listed in the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators worldwide who were under 35 years old.