Ryan Hewitt has been a web developer for over 10 years and has worked extensively with concrete5, with it being his content management system of choice.
Ryan's background includes working for both large and small development companies, wading through oceans of code and fighting SQL beasts, PHP devils, and CSS nasties. He has written numerous custom online systems and scripts—finding solace in the advantages that well written frameworks and libraries such as CakePHP, jQuery, Boostrap Twitter, and concrete5 bring forth.
Ryan started his own web development business in 2011, with his partner Lelita Baldock, called Mesuva Web Development. From the beautiful coastal town of Goolwa, in South Australia, Ryan and Lelita build a wide range of websites and online shops using concrete5, often heavily customizing them with custom-built blocks and packages.
One of concrete5's greatest strengths as a CMS is its active online community, and Ryan takes pride in contributing answers and insights to the online forum, as well as providing free concrete5 packages and support.
The Mesuva website can be found at https://www.mesuva.com.au and Ryan can be contacted through it.
Werner Nindl is an Oracle Hyperion consultant by day and a concrete5 web developer by night. As a consultant, he has lived and worked in Europe, China, and the US. During his day job, Werner manages consulting programs for Financial Consolidation and Reporting.
Intrigued by the capabilities of concrete5, he has started to convert his clients' web sites to concrete5. Participating in the review of this book has helped him to plan for future enhancements. He believes that he can implement those enhancements now at a much lower resource cost then previously planned.
John Steele began teaching himself BASIC on a borrowed Atari. He purchased his first computer, the Timex Sinclair 1000, later trading it in on a Commodore 64. He then taught himself 6502 Assembly followed by the C language, creating a 3D wireframe program to design a hang-glider.
He was a Mathematics major, switching to Computer Science as soon as the degree program was available. He worked as a Systems Programmer at the IBM Almaden Research Center using C, Fortran, Pascal, and 8086 Assembly. Next, he worked as Systems Analyst and Lead Programmer for the largest selling POS software for video stores. He was a beta tester for every version of the Microsoft C compiler.
Fascinated by the Internet, he taught himself PHP3 and MySQL programming and started his business Steelesoft Consulting. He's used just about every Unix-based operating system since the DEC PDP-11 and owns the first version of Linux on CD.
He's also been a technical editor for two PHP4 books by Osborne-McGraw Hill.