I grew up in and around Portsmouth in southern England.
I come from a long line of teachers and became one myself as soon as I graduated from university. Teaching never made me rich, but it did pay the bills during years living in Wales, Mexico, Japan, Australia, and the United States.
During my travels I dabbled with building web sites and in discovered open source. Later I ended up teaching in Atlanta, Georgia and my evening job as a web designer was making more money than my day job as a teacher. I quit my job, founded a company called Alledia started building open source websites professionally.
After a few years and few dozen web sites, I was spending too long in my office, starting at the computer screen. I started to feel the urge to teach again. A friend asked me to teach a class in Chicago: I loved it. The reintroduction to teaching lead to more classes in Atlanta, New York,Washington, and other cities. They went so well that I’ve ended up combing my two careers and becoming a full-time teacher of open source.
I now run OSTraining.com which teaches thousands of people online and live every year. OSTraining clients include Apple, Pfizer and the U.S. Departments of Energy, Education and Commerce.
In other projects, I wrote Joomla Explained, one of the books in the official Joomla Press series. The book was successful enough to inspire a series will start releasing the autumn of 2012.