“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” ~ The Wizard of Oz

Michael Fountain

I’ve always loved that quote, but I hate not knowing who’s behind a web site. Don’t you?

So, let me introduce myself. My name is Michael Fountain and I’ve been coding up the web for over 10 years now.

In short, I started my development career at Amazon.com back in 2000. In 2002 I left Amazon to build my first enterprise app, ModernBill, which was later sold to Parallels, Inc. in 2008. Since then, I’ve designed & built web apps for various clients as a software consultant under my brand, gotphp, inc. If you’re the curious type and want to know more, feel free to head over to my portfolio here.

The goal of this site, gotphp.com, is to give practical CodeIgniter examples and advice that you can use in everyday PHP application development.

Why CodeIgniter you might ask?

I know there are many great PHP frameworks out there to choose from today, but that was not always the case. Back in 2001 when ModernBill was created, there were no frameworks to choose from so we did like many others did and built our own. Throughout the years, version after version, the ModernBill framework grew and was repurposed in many of our other software applications; and in 2008 all of that intellectual property was scooped up by Parallels.

Having spent the better part of 8 years in a single framework, it was time to see what else was out there. CodeIgniter was around version 1.6 and Zend Framework was just getting started. Yes there were others such as CakePHP and Kahona, a spinoff of CI, but in my opinion, CI just felt right. I liked it. It got the job done. And for the most part it didn’t get in your way. Fast forward to today and it’s my framework of choice, although I do like to sprinkle in the occasional Zend library or two.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll be adding more content over the next few weeks so check back often.

Thanks for listening!

~ Michael