Michael Shadle is a self-proclaimed surgeon, when it comes to procedural PHP. He has been using PHP for over ten years along with MySQL and various Linux and BSD distributions. He has switched between many different web servers over the years and considers Nginx to be the best solution yet.
During the day he works as a senior Web Developer at Intel Corporation on a handful of public-facing websites. He enjoys using his breadth of knowledge to come up with "out of the box" solutions to solve the variety of issues that come up. During the off-hours, he has a thriving personal consulting, web development practice, and has many more personal project ideas than he can tackle at once.
He is a minimalist by heart, and believes that when architecting solutions, starting small and simple allows for a more agile approach in the long run. Michael also coined the phrase, "A simple stack is a happy stack."
Alex Kapranoff was born in a family of an electronics engineer and a programmer for old Soviet "Big Iron" computers. He started to write programs at the age of 12 and has never worked outside of the IT industry since then. After getting his Software Engineering degree with honors he had a short stint in the world of enterprise databases and Windows. Then he settled on open-source Unix-like environments for good, first FreeBSD and then Linux, working as a developer for many Russian companies from ISPs to search engines. Most of his experience has been with e-mail/messaging systems and web security. Right now he is trying his hand at a product and project management position in Yandex, one of the biggest search engines in the world.
He took his first look at Nginx working in Rambler side-by-side with Nginx's author Igor Sysoev before the initial public release of the product. Since then, Nginx has been an essential tool in his kit. He won't launch a website, no matter how complex it is, without using Nginx nowadays.
He strongly believes in the Free Software Movement, loves Perl, plain C, LISP, cooking, and fishing, and lives with a beautiful girlfriend and an old cat in Moscow, Russia.