I’m the President of Phillips Data, Inc., and although we incorporated in early 2008 we got started way back in 2000, right after the dot com bust.

In 2002 I started writing a simple billing application in PHP that we would use in-house. The application was named AC4, which stood for Automated Complete Customer Control Center. Through several complete rewrites in the course of 5 years we eventually settled on the name Blesta, which we launched publicly in 2007. Our Lead Developer, Cody, was instrumental in bringing Blesta to market.

I often joke that my day consists of one distraction leading to yet another. I wear many hats and am involved in many projects, but Blesta is by far my favorite.

When it comes to Blesta, I set overall goals for development and work with Cody to determine the best approach. A lot of thought and planning goes into every new feature before a single line of code is written, our customers deserve nothing less.

I’m the Lead Developer here at Phillips Data, Inc., which means I spend a large portion of my time planning and integrating new features into Blesta.

When I first joined the Blesta dev team in 2006 the project was designed to run on PHP 4 servers. Since PHP 5 offered so many great object oriented improvements over its predecessor I pushed for a firm PHP 5 system requirement. At the time no competing product could even run on PHP 5, which meant product migration would be slow, so it was a risky move. In retrospect, it was definitely the right decision. PHP 5 adoption has grown by leaps and bounds, we’ve been able to make large aspects of our code base open source, and we’re strategically positioned to take full advantage of PHP 6.

For me, most days consist of juggling three to four projects and explaining how regular expressions are derived from finite automata, or some other random theoretics, to everyone in the office.

Tyson will update his profile shortly.