Taking Joomla! to new heights

Sam Varghese
Friday, 08 May 2009 05:31

Opinion and Analysis

Eddie is the development coordinator for the Joomla! project. He also runs his own company, New Life in IT, which provides consulting and training around the CMS.

(Disclosure: iTWire uses Joomla!, plus a few proprietary extensions, to run this website).

Joomla! is a fork of a project named Mambo; it split off in 2005. Joomla!, which literally means "all together", has been remarkably successful and is estimated to run millions of websites. It has won numerous awards as well.

Eddie, who is in his late 30s, says he missed his childhood calling to be an astronaut. "Maybe one day I'll get a sub-orbital flight," he joked during an interview with iTWire.

While in high school, he developed a love for drafting and, as a result, wanted to continue with this at the tertiary level; hence, he decided it would be better to complete a degree rather than a diploma. That led him into civil engineering.

He had an early start as far as coding goes. "I started coding on the Apple 2 in 1990 (about my year 9 in high school)," he says.

"The engineering degree covered learning UNIX, Fortran and C and my final year thesis was writing a basic solid's modeller to integrate with finite element analysis packages. When I wasn't writing basic C programs to help with engineering calculations I was pushing Lotus and Excel spreadsheets to their limits."

In early 2000, he joined the GIS department of what was then the Toowoomba City Council, developing web information systems. While there he learned HTML, Perl and PHP from scratch.

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