Richard Carter is the Director at Richard Carter Consultancy Ltd (http://www.richardcarterconsultancy.com), an open source web software consultancy, and Creative Director at Peacock Carter Ltd (http://www.peacockcarter.co.uk), a web design and development agency, both based in the North East of England. He has helped clients around the world get to grips with open source software, including Directgov, NHS Choices, Business Link, University College Dublin, and the German Historical Institute London.
Richard is the author of MediaWiki Skins Design, Magento 1.3 Themes Design, Joomla! 1.5 Templates Cookbook, and Magento 1.4 Themes Design. He has acted as a technical reviewer on MediaWiki 1.1 Beginner's Guide, Inkscape 0.48 Essentials for Web Designers, Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, and Drupal 7 Business Solutions, and is a co-founder of the Drupal North East user group (http://www.drupalnortheast.org.uk).
He blogs at http://www.earlgreyandbattenburg.co.uk and tweets nonsense at http://twitter.com/RichardCarter.
Richard Eriksson has been a member of the Drupal community since 2004 (visit his profile at http://drupal.org/user/8791). Richard has worked on the community support and systems administration team at Bryght, the first commercial Drupal venture (later purchased by Raincity Studios), and later OpenRoad Communications, where he helped build video-intensive multilingual Drupal websites promoting video games. He also maintains an independent consultancy called Ethical Detergent specializing in Drupal maintenance and support. On Drupal.org, he maintains the Pirate and RSS Permissions modules, the Cherry Blossom Theme, and most recently, the Readability Button module. He writes occasionally on his blog, Just a Gwai Lo (http://justagwailo.com/).
He has also worked on the following books:
Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook
Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook
John K Murphy is a software industry veteran with more than 25 years' experience as a programmer and database administrator. A graduate of the University of West Virginia he began writing computer games in the 1980s before pursuing a career as a computer consultant. Over the years, John has enjoyed developing software in most major programming languages while striving to keep current with new technologies.
In his spare time, John enjoys scuba diving, skydiving, and piloting small planes. He lives with his wife and two children in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Jeff Smith grew up in Odon, Indiana before moving to Indianapolis. He has 15 plus years of experience in the IT Industry as well as 9 months experience as a .NET developer. He loves learning new technologies and dabbles quite a bit on the side.
He works for the Indiana Department of Workforce Development as an Application Developer.
He has reviewed the books CakePHP 1.3 Application Cookbook and Drupal 7 Business Solutions.
Ravishankar Somasundaram has over six years of experience in providing solutions to clients across multiple sectors and domains. Being more passionate about learning and teaching, he also strongly believes that the sole purpose of learning is to make our minds think in different perspectives and facilitates the same in his training sessions through a blended learning approach mainly focused on how to learn to learn.
In his lower schoolings, apart from winning several prizes in science projects, he was awarded the title Junior Scientist in an inter-school science fest for a model display on Evolution of Airplanes through Aerodynamics by the committee consisting of people from ISRO. This was one of his major childhood achievements.
His final year college project was aimed at eliminating the scenario of English alone being the medium of programming in all programming languages, which restricts people who don't know English getting into the field of IT and implementing their ideas. The project was selected and funded by MIT NRCFOSS and considered as a landmark.
Being one of only seven people from India and the only one from Tamilnadu as an official third-party developer of Moodle code, Ravi shares his knowledge by helping people on the Moodle official forum and on IRC. He has also presented a paper in the ninth International Tamil Internet Conference on Moodle: For Enhanced Learning which talks about leveraging Moodle's capability to expand the user base for one of the oldest languages known to mankind—Tamil.
Ravi was a Freelance IT Consultant delivering solutions to firms irrespective of technical, non-technical, or business domains. Currently he works for Thirdware Technologies as a Technical Analyst and Chief Architect heading the R&D Division.
Recently he represented his company at an international conference Yugma—Unleashing the Innovation Potential with an idea which uses artificial intelligence to empower the next generation of enterprise mobile solutions.