Karsten Dambekalns, born in 1977, learned the basics of web technology the hard way - by looking at other websites' HTML source. This happened after having learned BASIC and Assembler on a good old Commodore C128.

Karsten discovered PHP in 1999 and and was caught by TYPO3's immense possibilities in 2002. Later, he joined the TYPO3 Association and today is part of the TYPO3 5.0 and FLOW3 development team.

In 2000, he founded his own Internet company together with a friend from university, which he left behind in 2008 to become a freelancer working fully on the development of TYPO3. Karsten also speaks at conferences and writes articles about topics around PHP and TYPO3.

Karsten mostly lives in Germany with his wife Līga, their three kids, and a nameless Espresso machine.

Mario Rimann, born in 1982 in Zürich, Switzerland, started his journey through the IT jungle back in the early 90s. After his primary education as a service technician for office equipment like printers, copy machines, fax machines, and computers, he moved to his first job as a system administrator at a school. After collecting some years of IT and "people-skills", Mario moved onto the European headquarters of a company running a big website in the nightlife business, later he had his own company, and is now again a regular employee.

While being employed at the above-mentioned school, he made his first contact with TYPO3. In the beginning, it was mainly a hobby—which evolved to be the main part of his own company. In 2006 and 2007, he organized the first two international TYPO3 Developer Days, which took place in Switzerland.

Right now, Mario is employed as a project manager and developer at a mid-sized web-agency in central Switzerland that specializes in TYPO3 and Magento.

Alongside his job, Mario also helps out in several TYPO3 projects.

You can contact him at <[email protected]>.

Mathias Schreiber has been working in the Web industry since 1995, developing websites with database-driven content for several large companies throughout Europe. He has been a part of the TYPO3 community since early 2002. Ever since then, he has been close to the core development and also hosted early developer meetings in 2004.

He did more than 100 training sessions in Germany and Switzerland spreading the word about TYPO3 and has trained most of today's successful TYPO3 companies.

In 2004, he founded wmdb Systems together with Peter Kühn, Diana Beer, and Bodo Eichstaedt and since then he maintains large TYPO3 projects for many well-known companies from Europe.

For two years, he has been part of the 12 so called active members of the TYPO3 Association but resigned from his duties to focus on his company and family.

Today, you can find him on almost any TYPO3 event there is—training snowboard-beginners at the TYPO3 Snowboard tours, mentoring bug-fixing sessions on the TYPO3 Developer days, or sharing ideas on the TYPO3 Conference.