Memphis Software Developer, Author, and Open Source Software


The PHP Mascot ElePHPants Joe Ferguson is a software developer specializing in infrastructure, DevOps, and back-end development. He's actively involved in several open-source projects in different areas of virtualization and programming languages. He's on the board of Open Sourcing Mental Health, promoting the importance of mental health awareness in the tech and open-source communities. Joe's been actively involved in his local tech community for many years, starting and supporting multiple community events, including the Memphis Technology Foundation, which fosters mentoring and peer support for the technical community. He's been married to his incredibly supportive and amazing wife for a long time, and she turned him into a crazy cat man. They live in the Memphis suburbs with their two cats.

Joe has been speaking at conferences since 2014 on topics such as HTML form security, Virtual Machines with Vagrant, PHP Best Practices, the Laravel PHP Framework, DevOps for small teams, Continuous Integration and several other development related topics. He also has given training on the Laravel PHP Framework and PHP Security through php[architect] and has also a monthly columnist. The Simi

Joe frequently contribute to various open source projects such as Laravel Homestead, and other side projects. Previously he helped maintain the PHP IRC Bot project Phergie. In 2016 he got involved with Open Sourcing Mental Illness, LTD and also a member of the Memphis Technology Foundation

Cat Person Joe is interested in programming, DevOps, automation, and all the different technologies that come out of the industry. He's heavily involved with our local makerspace here in Memphis and also a lifetime fan of the Chicago Blackhawks and frequents Memphis 901FC soccer matches.

Languages & Tools

Python, PHP, Git, Ansible, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Pandas, Dagster, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Ajax, nginx, HAProxy, Apache, Github, GitHub Actions and CICD, GitLab, GitLab CICD, TeamCity, Codeception, Puppet.

Frameworks

Django, Flask, Laravel, Symfony, SlimPHP, Kohana, Zend Framework 3.x, Zend Expressive, Laminas, jQuery, Some ExpressionEngine, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, AngularJS, React, Vue.js.

Server Administration, Automation, Scalability

Experienced in management and deployment of: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu as well as administration of Amazon Web Services platforms and APIs. and extensive experience building on Digital Ocean's Platform as a Service offerings to provide customized solutions for modern cloud native applications and workflows.

Operating Systems

macOS, Windows 10, Linux: Ubuntu Linux, Rocky Linux, CentOS, RHEL, Debian, RaspberryPi OS (Raspian/Debian)

Virtualization

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which Joe authored a book about WSL and PHP, Docker, Vagrant, Ansible, Hyper-V, VMware, Parallels, Extensive Shell Scripting, BASH, ZSH, Packer, Puppet, Virtualbox, OpenVZ, ProxmoxVE.  Extensive experience in building customized Vagrant development virtual machines for local development.