Joseph L. LeBlanc started with computers at a very young age. His independent education gave him the flexibility to experiment and learn computer science. Joseph holds a bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems from the Oral Roberts University.
Joseph is currently a freelance Joomla! extension developer. He released a popular component tutorial in May 2004, then later authored the book Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP. Work samples and open-source extensions are available at www.jlleblanc.com. In addition to freelancing, he is a board member of the DC PHP Conference. He has also worked as a programmer for a web communications firm in Washington, DC.
Riccardo Tacconi works for an Italian company as a system administrator and web developer using PHP, MySQL, and Oracle. He is an MCP and studies IT part-time at the British Open University. His main interests are web development, Windows and Linux administration, Robotics, and Java software development (JMF, motion detection, CV, and distributed systems).
He loves Linux and he is a proud member of the local Linux User Group: GROLUG. He tries to innovate ways to substitute Windows-based technologies with Linux and open-source alternatives.