Alexander Makarov graduated from Voronezh State University in 2007 with a master degree in computer science. During his study, he started working on homegrown PHP frameworks and projects trying various design patterns and techniques. During the last year of his study, he spent a year working for Siemens mainly doing Java coding and complex SQL reports and also did many small and medium freelance projects in his free time. In 2007, he joined an outsourcing company, Murano Software, and had a lot of experience with web development in general, J2EE, PHP, and client-side technologies working on projects such as wrike.com and docufide.com. As in previous years he did some notable freelance jobs, including social network for Russia Today built with Yii in 2009 and heavy loaded NNM.ru portal in 2008. Between 2008 and 2010, he helped the Russian CodeIgniter community to grow and started actively to contribute to open source projects. In 2009, Alexander joined Yii camp and started growing the Russian Yii community, translated documentation into Russian and, since May 2010, has become a passionate Yii framework core developer. He has published several articles in Smashing Magazine and a lot more in his Russian blog http://rmcreative.ru/, and has presented numerous talks on Yii and web development in general at various conferences. Alexander currently resides in Voronezh, Russia, with his beloved wife and daughter. Besides the web, he enjoys movies, rock music, travelling, photography, and languages.