Philip Herron is a developer who focuses his passion toward compilers and virtual machine implementations. When he was first accepted to Google Summer of Code 2010, he used inspiration from Paul Biggar's PhD on the optimization of dynamic languages to develop a proof of the concept GCC frontend to compile Python. This project sparked his deep interest in how Python works.

After completing a consecutive year on the same project in 2011, Philip applied to Cython under the Python foundation to gain a deeper appreciation of the standard Python implementation. Through this he started leveraging the advantages of Python to control the logic in systems or even add more high-level interfaces, such as embedding Flask web servers in a REST API to a system-level piece of software, without writing any C code.

Philip currently works as a software consultant for Instil Software based in Northern Ireland. He develops mobile applications with embedded native code for video streaming. Instil has given him a lot of support in becoming a better engineer.

He has written several tutorials for the UK-based Linux Format magazine on Python and loves to share his passion for the Python programming language.