First and foremost, Israel Ekpo believes in Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and savior. He sees the Lord God as the author and finisher of his faith. He remains grateful to the Lord because without Him, most of the accomplishments he has acquired during his lifetime would not have been possible.
Israel is a member of the Redeemed Christian Church of God - Jesus House Orlando where he currently leads in the music department as a keyboardist.
He is also a senior software engineer with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online.
Israel holds a bachelors degree in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University and has over 9 years of professional software development experience.
When it comes to giving back to the open source community, Israel has a fair amount of open source work he has contributed and many more in the making. He is the author and lead maintainer of the Solr PHP extension at PECL as well as the popular phpPaypalPro framework at Sourceforge currently with over 12,000 downloads so far.
He currently resides in Orlando, Florida with his extremely intelligent and beautiful wife June and his lovely, handsome son Joshua.
Israel enjoys spending time with his wife and son and his hobbies and interests include music, soccer, cooking, data mining, information retrieval, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
