So it's PHP's 10th birthday today, and a lot of people wrote about their story with PHP; so here's mine. It's not that interesting as I'm a mere user of PHP (having contributed nothing but a few bug reports):

In 1998, a friend showed me the php.net homepage - we were impressed by PHP3's functionality and database connectivity, and by the unbelievably useful online manual.

A few weeks later, I went to a job interview - they said it was OK not to know PHP yet, they'd train me on the job. And they did! Thies C. Arntzen was my boss, and it was absolutely great being taught PHP - and programming in general - by him.

In some ways our company's use of PHP was different from the mainstream: Even back in 1998, with PHP3, we were building a commercial, relatively large (and expensive...) web-based application, we were using the PHP CLI for background (daemon) and batch processes, doing XML processing, object oriented programming, and running on Oracle. And we still do so now.

It's been seven good years during which PHP helped feed my family, and I'm still surprised all this is possible with "just a scripting language"... A big thank you to the PHP Group!