Hello Again to you all.. I am pleased to be able to bring you some Breaking News - the New Schedule concerning RevLive 2008! You'll be able to learn how to perfect your skills in database front ends, using the latest features on Linux, getting the most out of unicode, report printing, and much much more...

The Speaker

Phil Davis is a software developer who lives in the Portland, Oregon area. Upon introducing himself to Kevin Miller at Revcon 2005, Kevin responded, "Phil Davis? You've been around forever!" Not exactly how one wants to be remembered, but HEY – it's good to be remembered at all.

Phil has always enjoyed looking for (and often finding) ways to make things do more than you think they can. As a teenager during the muscle-car era, he worked at a sports car shop and learned to make them go faster and handle better than they should be able to. He enjoyed making explosives from common household items, and of course he designed, constructed and finished his own skateboards. He produced a hundred times more dreams than results, partly (he claims) because of the expense and limitations of physical things.

Finally one day Phil grew up. After earning a degree in Religion and finding he was not employable, Phil turned from his teaching aspirations to pursue a career in Data Processing. That's right… IBM 360 Model 30 with 32K of memory, punch cards, COBOL, RPG II, PL/I... true Paleozoic Era technology. He was finally earning an honest living. His family was relieved.

But some things never change. Phil was happily surprised by a wonderful freedom from physical constraints when working with virtual things instead of physical ones. After a decade of mainframe programming, having tweaked his company's systems to the limits of his access, Phil had a life-transforming encounter with a Mac Plus. This effected a change of career vision and direction, and in 1988 he moved into commercial product development using HyperCard and Pascal. The products failed but his personal gain was enormous.

From there Phil worked in various computing environments, platforms, roles and projects, progressing through SuperCard, Oracle Media Objects, and Visual Basic among others. Finally in 1996 while employed as a multimedia developer, he began using Metacard on Unix to create CD-based interactive sales materials for high tech companies. Then not long after it came into existence, Revolution became Phil's primary development platform.

Now Phil runs his own company and joyfully spends most of his time using Revolution to build things that do more than you think they can, thanks to Revolution. Most of his work is for other companies, but he's starting to work on a few projects of his own with a view toward taking them to the bank as well.

The Session