Joe Watkins is a really nice person and contributed a lot to php including the thread support (php-pthreads) the debugger (php-dbg) and other really impressive stuff.

The nice story here is when he was in financial trouble (because of a bad employer) the community stepped up and donated to him ( https://www.gofundme.com/b9dfcg ).

He has constantly been useful and a positive force of change and any language ecosystem would be happy to have him.

I believe that he is a contributor to PHP itself.