Most joomlers have visited one of Steve Burge's sites at some time, whether it's OSTraining for training or Joomlashack for extensions. What most of his tools have in common is their use in education.
We were curious to know why this former schoolteacher decided to devote his professional life to providing quality Joomla tools, so we asked him, and Steve kindly replied :

Hello Steve,
Many Joomla users are familiar with your extensions and services, but we don't really know much about you. Can you give us a quick introduction?

Hi Serge.
I’m from England originally and now live in Florida in the USA. I’ve been working with open source software for about 20 years. Most of my early work with Joomla involved training. We did live classes and videos at OSTraining.com. I sold that company a few years ago and now focus on developing extensions at Joomlashack.com. We develop popular extensions such as OSMap, JCal Pro, OSCampus, and Shack Forms.

What was your first encounter with Joomla?

I’m old enough to have encountered Joomla before it was Joomla. In the early 2000’s I was getting a Masters degree and wanted some way to put my research online. I came across Mambo (the predecessor to Joomla) and was amazed at how easy it was to publish a website. So for the first few years, I had no interest in working professionally with Mambo/Joomla. I wanted to be a teacher instead.

When did you start developing? At the same period before or later?

After a couple of years of being a teacher, I ran into the realities of that career (at least in the USA). I couldn’t make enough money. The other teachers told me it would get better after the first decade, but I had a young family and couldn’t wait that long. As a teacher, it seemed obvious to try and use those skills to teach people how to use Joomla, and open source software.

What led you to create your Joomla extension in particular?

Our very first extension was OSDownloads which we built so that OSTraining members could download files for classes. We offered PDFs of books, plus video downloads. 

Our next extension was also created for our training business. We built OSCampus because we couldn’t find a good Learning Management System for Joomla.

What challenges did you face? How did you overcome them?

In the early days of 2005 to about 2008 it was easy to get started because the market was strong and growing quickly. We did live training classes all over the USA and I got to travel to all sorts of great places. We had a lot of government business up until the US government shut down in 2013. It took a couple of years before the government started spending on training again and by that time people were looking to learn online rather than in a classroom. That was the main reason for our pivot to developing extensions. Online training wasn’t as fun or as profitable as building software.

Are you in contact with other independent developers? How can this kind of collaboration work?

Yes, over the years I’ve been part of several groups where developers talk about their work and their life. Particularly in the early days a lot of the developers worked alone and appreciated the company. Sometimes we’d directly collaborate, but often it was helping each other out with problems, and sharing experiences. People such as Vic Drover from Watchful and Robbie Adair from OSTraining have been very helpful friends over the years.

What are the topics people always ask for support?

At the moment we’re trying to juggle support for both Joomla 3 and Joomla 5 in one package. I know a lot of Joomla developers have dropped Joomla 3 support. But we’ve committed to helping our Joomla 3 customers until they’re able to move. This has been a technical challenge and takes up a good amount of our support time. 

Do you get a lot out of the Joomla community?

Yes, absolutely. Over the years I’ve been heavily involved with meetups and Joomla Days. I’ve traveled to multiple Joomla World Conferences and JandBeyond events. Some of my best friends in the software business have come from Joomla.

What is your involvement in the Joomla community?

Over the years, I’ve run meetups and Joomla Days. I’ve been on the JED team, and the Open Source Matters board. I wrote several editions of the official Joomla book. That kept me busy for more than 10 years. Right now, I’m mostly retired from active day-to-day involvement.

What do you think of Joomla's ecosystem?

We’re in Joomla’s “mature” stage now. We had rapid growth, then slower growth and now a plateau. There’s more than enough people still involved and using Joomla to keep the ecosystem alive, if we manage it well. That’s one reason we try to support all our customers on Joomla 3. If they’re happy with their current site, we’ll help them keep it.

How do you see your future with Joomla? 

We’ll be here as long as our customers are using the extensions. If you’re reading this and are using Joomlashack extensions, we’ll be here to support you.