Hi there! My name is Jim (or James) Seconde, and I am absolutely delighted to be joining the Vonage Developer Relations as your resident PHP language Advocate!

For those that don’t know me in the PHP world, I have a fairly unusual background in tech, in that I am a trained actor. I graduated from the University of Chester in 2006 with a BA in Theatre Studies and English Literature - however, the more Developer Advocates I meet from across the world leads me to believe this isn’t actually that uncommon!

While doing theatre work at the super Rosemary Branch Theatre in North London, I became a SQL Q/A, then a Business Intelligence developer before finally taking the plunge into full stack web development with PHP back in 2010. Not knowing how to get into the language and without a job in it, I just started ...going to meetups, to speak to people and to work out how to take my career in this direction. The rest, as they say, is history.

So, I’m a product of the meetup scene, and in 2018 I started speaking on stage (back to my roots) and writing on tech culture. In 2017 I moved to Birmingham and founded the current PHP usergroup, as well as becoming part of the Fusion meetup team as Community Lead.

When you don’t see me working on our PHP core SDK or writing/speaking on PHP (or other backend languages, I’m open minded to new experiences!), you can find me playing and collecting weird records on my podcast The Dev Radio or cooking average international dishes.