Rafael Machado Dohms works as a Software Architect, acting throughout the engineering organization, lending his communication and vision skills to help teams solve problems and deliver value. His career started in PHP over 20 years ago, slowly growing to be language agnostic, focusing on Systems Design and building Cultures.

His communication skills are deeply rooted in a passion for teaching and helping developers grow, giving them a voice and a space to find their path toward meaningful impact. Eventually, leading him to extensive work with Development Communities and various engagements speaking at conferences worldwide on topics ranging from soft skills to architecture and code quality.

In the past, he founded 3 User Groups and helped promote various events to involve more people with PHP and its ecosystem. In Brazil, he founded PHPDF and PHPSP while living in Brasília and São Paulo, respectively. He currently sits on the board for AmsterdamPHP, co-created in 2012.

His skill set involves the development and architecture of systems. He enjoys creating and managing teams, mainly from a technical aspect, developing workflow, quality assurance procedures, peer reviews, and many more processes to allow the team to operate efficiently and produce high-quality output. With this, he has also accumulated experience in the different parts of the ecosystem, such as databases, architecture, leading teams, automation, and operations.

A strong advocate for OSS, he mourns his weening time and contributions but continues to advocate inside companies to give back and embrace the culture. In the past, he made valuable contributions to projects like Doctrine, Symfony, and PHP, such as patches, support, and documentation.