Our Team

Meet Your OSTeam

Introducing OST’s core group.

Robbie Adair

CEO / Trainer

Robbie has a BA from Stephen F. Austin State University. She started her career in corporate training until starting her own custom training and media company over twenty years ago. In 2010, she began doing classroom training for OSTraining while running Media A-Team before purchasing OSTraining from Steve Burge in 2019. She lives in Houston, Texas, but enjoys all the travel for client work and speaking gigs. She’s also an excellent Drone Pilot/Videographer!

She is often presenting about various tech topics such as Joomla, WordPress, Web Development, Social Media, and Augmented Reality. She loves seeing that “ah-ha” moment in peoples eyes in her sessions and workshops.

Mikall Small Mountain

Mikall Hill

CCO / Contributor

Mikall holds a Bachelor’s of Arts with a double major in Photojournalism and English. She has worked in the graphic art, marketing, and web world for over 25 years and is super excited to bring all of her experience to OSTraining as Chief Creative Officer.     

In her “spare” time, she likes to create using her 3D printer, Sony DSLR, and/or Cricut machine.  She has also written a screenplay with plans to explore directing & cinematography!

You can find her handiwork all over the “look and feel” of this site, in our books, videos, trade show booth, and blogs.

Rod Martin

Rod Martin

Lead Trainer

Rod holds two masters degrees and has been training people how to do “things” for over 25 years. Originally from Australia, he grew up in Canada and now resides just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. 

Rod’s extensive open source experience includes WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Mautic, and Moodle. He really knows how to help you get the most out of the system you chose. Rod plays ice hockey a couple of times a week and rides his Goldwing motorbike pretty much everywhere he can.

You can find his courses in our Drupal and Joomla sections and his OSTips videos on our YouTube channel.

Bekka Chambers

Bekka Chambers

operations coordinator

Bekka holds a BA in Psychology from Michigan State and is Certified in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention from Cornell.  She takes care of many of the day-to-day administrative tasks including, but not limited to, the member help tickets, and she makes sure that we all stay on task, on schedule, and sane!

Bekka is pretty much up for helping out any way she can, so don’t be surprised to find her working our booth at a conference in the near future!  

In her free time, she  enjoys running, learning new things, camping, baking, all things chocolate, and wine.

Michael Adair

Webmaster / Contributor

Mike an expert level CSS/SASS coder and a Joomla and Fabrik template builder. He is also familiar with WordPress and Drupal, particularly from the theme building stand point. He also works on many hosted solution platforms to manipulate templates for branding, such as 3D Cart, Wix, and Shopify.

His latest venture includes Tailwind within PHPStorm which is a JetBrains owned IDE, Laravel, and Filament.

He has a degree in Science (mathematics) and lives in Texas. In his free time, he enjoys reading, playing online games, jogging, streaming all kinds of stuff from South Park to The Expanse.

You will find his blogs in the Code section.

Hugh Messenger

Hugh Messenger

Developer / Contributor

Hugh is a proud member of the Development Team bringing over 30 years of experience in programming & network management to the table. He is an expert in PHP, SQL, Javascript, JQuery, Joomla, Asterisk, and a crazy amount of other platforms and technologies.  

He hails from England but now calls Alabama home – where his accent sticks out like a sore thumb! But, he plays the Hammond organ like a champ, so it’s all good in sweet home Alabama!  In his spare time he enjoys his 3D printer, Sim racing, and challenging himself with new technologies. (React and Laravel are just a few of his latest conquests.)

His handiwork is rarely seen, but ALWAYS necessary and super valuable to us and our members.

Meet Your Extended OSTeam

Other OSTrainers / Bloggers / Authors.

Topher DeRosia

Trainer / Blogger

Christopher DeRosia (Topher) has been “doing the web” since 1994. With the advent of PHP in 1998, his web sites became much more dynamic and exciting. He is an accomplished programmer, having written his own content management systems and managed some very large websites.

He loves to help people enjoy their websites and believes, “playing with WordPress is fun!”. He has built over 30 sites with custom themes and plugins. Topher lives in Michigan, USA.

Jen Kramer

Trainer

For over 20 years, Jen Kramer has been educating clients, colleagues, friends and graduate students about the meaning of a “quality website.” An award-winning instructor, Jen has taught web design, educational technology, and storytelling principles to students from Harvard University and other academic institutions, and students learning in conferences, workshops, and corporate environments.

You can find her OST courses in the Coding section or our site.

Steve Burge

Trainer / Blogger / Author

Steve is the founder of the OSTraining. He is from the U.K., but now lives in Sarasota in the U.S.A.. He was a public school teacher for many years before starting OSTraining back in 2009.

Steve has been heavily involved in various open source projects, writing books, starting user groups, serving on boards of directors and much more.

You can find his courses spread across this site.

Michael Anello

Author

Michael Anello is an expert Drupal developer and trainer. His company, Anello Consulting, owns DrupalEasy.com and specializes in Drupal training, as well as, designing and developing Drupal-powered sites.

Michael is an active member of the Drupal community, including one of the lead organizers of the Florida Drupal community.

His specialties include custom, private Drupal training for organizations,  and custom module and theme development for the Drupal content management system.

Michael is the author of Local Web Development With DDEV Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Local Web Development With DDEV.

Nate Finch

Author/Trainer

Nate has been working on the web since 2011. He loves web development because it is the perfect mix of problem solving, helping people, and lifelong learning. He’s currently a Full-Stack Engineer at Elementor.com, He previously worked at Strattic.com where he helped build serverless integrations for WordPress. Prior to joining Strattic, Nate worked as VP of Development at TheDigitalRing.com, where he split his time between developing websites and developing developers. He’s spent the bulk of his web career freelancing, working with hundreds of clients through platforms like Toptal and Codeable, and even completed a brief stint as a web engineer with 10up. Nate collects masters degrees, has traveled to six continents, lived on four, speaks Spanish, and outside of work, family, friends, food, coffee, and cooking are his favorite activities. He lives in Wisconsin with his wonderful wife and two daughters.

Allie Nimmons

TRAINER

Allie is an Austin-based, self-taught WordPress evangelist. In 2014, after dropping out of theater school, Allie started teaching herself to code. She got her first internship in 2015, where she was introduced to WordPress. She spoke at her first WordCamp – WordCamp Miami – in 2017. Between 2016 to 2019, she built websites and provided WordPress support independently under the name Pixel Glow Web Design. She has spent time providing plugin support at GiveWP, being a speaker ambassador for GoDaddy Pro, leading the Community team at WP Buffs, and producing digital content for MasterWP.

Robert Ring

Trainer

Robert learned HTML/CSS back in 2008 when he decided to start a film review site, and he continued adding to his site file-by-file the old-fashioned way for a year. When he asked a web developer friend how to build a site that “automatically lists content on the homepage and stuff,” he was pointed to Drupal.

Since then, Robert has continued to build his experience with the CMS by using it on his own projects and by managing other brands’ pre-existing Drupal sites. In his spare time, Robert trains Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and works on too many side programming projects. He is also the author of two books.

Jorge Montoya

Blogger / Author

Jorge lived in Ecuador and Germany. Now he is back to his homeland Colombia.

He spends his time translating from English and German to Spanish. He enjoys playing with Drupal and other Open Source Content Management Systems and technologies.

Valentín García

Blogger

Valentin discovered Joomla in 2010, and since then he has considered it as the best CMS. Valentin has been coding extensions and templates for Joomla for many years and truly enjoys helping people build their own websites with Open Source tools.

He lives in San Julián, Jalisco, México.

Barb Ackemann

Trainer

After 28 years in public education, as classroom teacher, librarian and computer coordinator, Barb went into business for herself. She completed the Marlboro College Graduate School’s MSIT program in 2006, receiving the President’s Award for her capstone project – a Joomla! 1.0 site. She’s been building open source CMS websites ever since.

She’s happiest figuring out how to get database driven websites to deliver just what her clients need.

She has taught web coding and content management systems at the graduate and undergraduate levels. When not at her computer, you may find her working in her Vermont garden, playing Celtic tunes on a mandolin, or melting glass

Sara Graybill

Trainer

Sara is WordPress developer living near Tuttle, Oklahoma, where she’s been creating engaging, responsive, imaginative websites since 2009. She also has a lot of experience with training, having implemented a program for many of the sites she has deployed both personally and corporately.

From Sara: “I primarily use WordPress when I design because of its clean, professional-looking templates, and because it’s simple to use and gives you the ability to easily update and maintain it on your own, if you so choose.”

Josh Pollock

Trainer

Josh is a WordPress plugin developer, educator and entrepreneur. WordPress allowed him to travel the country, make new friends, be a part of an awesome community, and start multiple companies. 

When not pressing all the words, he enjoys reading, exercising, and eating tasty foods. 

He is the founder of CalderaWP makers of Caldera Forms, URL Builder and other fine WordPress plugins.  He is also a contributor to WordPress core, the WordPress REST API, and plugins by Foo Plugins, Postmatic, Pods, Aesop Interactive, WordImpress, GravityView and more.

Brian Lewis

Trainer

Brian started making Drupal videos right after Drupal 7 was launched in an effort to help other people experiencing the same conversion issues. 

With the videos he made, he had the idea to put together a series of short videos covering different topics. This format allowed him to go more in-depth with each module.  

Now you can find his videos here!

Vicki Watson

Trainer

Vicki is the lead web designer & developer at VWeb Web Design. She specializes in Joomla, custom Joomla templates, search engine optimization, website statistics/analytics, marketing/traffic building strategies and education/training to help you learn to manage your own site.

Vicki holds a B.S. in Computer Science and has taught as an adjunct professor for years.

She is a mom, teacher, author, and horse trainer.

Igor Mihaljko

Author

Igor Mihaljko works full time for an IT company in Croatia as a Business Solutions Consultant. He is also passionate about Joomla and has been working with it since the beginning. He continues to work with Joomla in his spare time as a freelance Joomla developer.

He also provides support for Joomla and writes blog posts about Joomla and documentation for various Joomla extensions.

Igor works and lives in Zagreb, the capital city of Croatia, together with his wife Martina and two beautiful kids, Petra and Dino.

Cory Webb

Trainer

Cory Webb has been building websites with Joomla since the Mambo days in 2003. He founded Cory Webb Media in 2008 to focus full time on helping businesses and organizations get online and up to speed with Joomla.

He has written a book for Joomla beginners titled “Beginning Joomla Website Development”. Cory taught live Joomla classes with OSTraining in Austin and Dallas.

Cory currently owns and drives the development of the Fast Checkout for WooCommerce plugin.  He contributes to the development of the Fast module for Magento, and supports the Fast customer success teams in helping merchants integrate Fast’s 1-click checkout with WooCommerce and Magento.

Enno Stuurman

Trainer

Ennos is from  Haarlem in the Netherlands. He works as a Magento front-end developer, webshop specialist and trainer. He is interested in and has a broad knowledge of e-commerce and is an e-commerce developer.

He loves to create beautiful Magento stories with optimal user experience on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops. With Magento the learning never seems to end.  He is currently digging more and more into the back-end which he finds a lot of fun to do.

He claims that his super powers are Patience, persistence, and curiosity.

Simon Kloostra

Trainer

Simon Kloostra is an independent web designer at SK-Web and specializes in the Joomla CMS and search engine optimization (SEO). Besides building commissioned websites, he often collaborates with other (Joomla) web agencies, especially on SEO projects.

In addition, he blogs extensively about this topic on Joomlaseo.com/nl and has also written 2 books on this topic, CMS Development Library: Joomla! SEO (Dutch), and  Joomla! 3 SEO and Performance (English).

He is also an active speaker within the Dutch Joomla community.

Diana M. Dupuis

Trainer

Diana Dupuis, VP of Engineering at Astonish Design, discovered her passion for computer science and web development by accident. Her son enrolled in a college physics course when he was unusually young and the professor asked her to accompany him to class. The following semester, she gave up writing and returned as a full-time physics major. After one (required) semester of C++, she dropped physics and followed the path of web application development (before there was such a thing).

Diana built features for big websites at Four Kitchens, including a custom credit card processing extension for the Wikimedia Foundation and modules for enterprise Drupal clients.

Diana enjoys speaking, training and developing curriculum as her contribution to the open-source community.  She especially enjoys working with beginners and encouraging women to try programming.

Jeff Large

Trainer

Jeff Large  is a teacher and musician turned business owner. He runs Come Alive Creative, a podcast production company. 

Jeff commonly works with marketing specialists and executives to produce results-driven podcasts for their companies and organizations. The shows he produces help establish the clients’ authority, generate new leads and sales, create networking opportunities that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, educate clients and employees, and influence large groups of people.

Jeff is finishing his M.Ed. in Literacy Studies and creates useful content for his personal blog and ostraining.com. Otherwise he can be found spending time with family, volunteering, or board gaming with friends.

Brent Laminack

Trainer

Long-time open source maven and SysAdmin, Brent has been active in the Atlanta technology scene for over 25 years, and is active in a number of local users’ groups.

He’s taught technology continuing education classes at Georgia Tech, Emory University and the University of Georgia. 

Cindy McCourt

Author/Trainer

Cindy McCourt has been a freelance website planner and builder, instructional designer and instructor, project manager, and facilitator and has taken part in the planning and building of numerous Drupal and non-Drupal websites and web-based systems over the past 30 years. In 2005, she built her first Drupal website using Drupal 4.6 and has been hooked ever since.

During this time, Cindy has been designing, developing, and delivering work shops and courses on technology and non-technology based subjects for both corporate and higher education organizations. She has also written technical papers on many topics for government and private sector clients. Cindy maintains a close relationship with the Drupal community through her blog, by speaking at Drupal events, and offering Drupal training. She has been described by some in the Drupal community as a “professional cat herder”.

Andrew Comeau

Author/Trainer

Andrew Comeau is a software programmer and consultant based in Florida. Since the 1990s, he has been designing database solutions both independently and for various companies. 

He started and currently organizes a local I.T. networking group called the Ocala I.T. Professionals in 2014, and is the author of our MySQL Explained book.

Andrew started his own business, Comeau Software Solutions that specializes in the development and enhancement of Microsoft Access applications. He can also rescue Access projects that have gone off-track and provide assistance when it’s time to move to another solution. 

Zac Gordon

Author/Trainer

Zac Gordon is a Community Builder for Static and Headless WordPress at Strattic. He has a background in education with a Masters in Curriculum Development and years of experience teaching at high schools, colleges, bootcamps and online learning sites like Treehouse, Udacity, Frontend Masters and Udemy.

He is the author of our Javascript, React, and Gatsby Explained books.  

Zac also teaches Office Yoga!