About seven years ago I was hacking up some small sites in HTML for small businesses in my neighbourhood. One of them wanted to collect some address details and we were using some crappy CGI script to talk to MySQL - something that looked like server side includes. After a couple of months the customer wanted some more features related to this contact database - but the simple CGI script couldn't handle this. Then my co-worker found something called PHP (version 3.0.5 or so).

This language has since then been part of my life, it started growing on me quite fast as it was easy to learn, and free. I think it even made me realize that Windows was crap and made me switch to Linux. After some time I needed to figure out the size of a Shockware Flash movie - something PHP couldn't just do yet. Instead of whining and bitching I decided it to code it myself - my first contribution to the PHP project. But this was certainly not the last one. Now I spend most of my professional time working with , and working on PHP - and most of my spare time working on various patches for PHP (although I now try to use some of my spare time for other things too ;-) ).

PHP changed my life quite a lot, and without Rasmus there would have been no PHP. I'd like to thank him for coming up with something that allow "you to implement a guestbook or any other form" — although you can do a little bit more with PHP now ;-). Let's get ready for the next 10 years!