Hello, I am Nicholas Dionysopoulos, a Mechanical Engineer from Greece who turned into Web Developer very early in his career. Chances are you already know me because of the software I develop. I am the Lead Developer of Akeeba Backup - that's an open source backup component for the magnificent Joomla! CMS - and author of a few other free programs, all available from this site.

I grew up and live in Nikaia, a suburb of Athens, Greece. I have acquired a degree in Mechanical Engineering, having attended the school of Mechanical Engineering of Aristotle's University of Thessaloniki. I've fulfilled my military obligations in the ranks of the Hellenic Air Force, serving as a reserve sergeant.

Since then I have worked as business consultant, a construction site engineer, after sales service supervisor and - ultimately - left engineering behind me, forming my own company in February 2010 to commercially support Akeeba Backup and my web development projects.

Programming experience

I have developed a strong interest in programming ever since before I actually bought a computer. I was intrigued by the idea of instructing a machine to perform specific task. At the age of eleven I bought my first computer, an Amstrad CPC 6128+, and starting learning the BASIC language. A few years - and several computers - later, I have programmed in different variants of BASIC (Locomotive BASIC, GW-BASIC, QBASIC, Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications, Visual Basic .NET, VBscript ASP), quite a few variants of Pascal (Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal, Turbo Pascal for Windows, Delphi, Free Pascal, Lazarus), 8086 assembly, PHP and JavaScript.

During my last year in university and though the end of my military obligations I had been collaborating with Concise Technologies, developing applications in Delphi, designing standards-compliant web sites and building or deploying PHP applications. Since 2006 I am maintaining the Joomla!-powered site of the Hellenic Association for Adult Education, a non-governmental organization in Greece.

I am the lead developer and Development Group Lead of Akeeba Backup, an open-source backup component for the open-source Joomla! CMS. The entire component is built with pattern-based codebase atop Joomla!'s PHP framework and it is doing really great. At this point, it is the only open source alternative for complete site backup (files, database and a restore script). It is not the only way to perform this task; it's merely the easiest - and I watch you write that it's the best as well.