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What you learned throughout elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and even in that fancy graduate program you mastered isn't all you need to know. What you have learned every day of your entire life even up to this moment isn't all you need to know. If it is, there's no room for growth, no room for improvement, nowhere to go.

I was good at math and science in high school, so naturally (in my mind at the time) I pursued a degree in electrical engineering. That degree served me well in getting a job right out of college as a SCSI hard drive qualification engineer at a major computer company headquartered in Round Rock, TX.

Throughout my tenure as a college student (1997-2001), I was always interested in web development as a hobby. In my spare time, I would play around with a site that I built on one of those free hosting sites and try out new techniques for displaying content using HTML. The more I tinkered with my site, the more I wanted to learn to enhance my skills for making that site better. I scoured the internet looking for tips and tutorials to learn as much as I could.

My site started off as a basic linear layout, and then I learned that you could use tables to position content in more interesting ways. Any time my wife and I would go to the book store, she would head to the fiction section and I would go over to the computer section to find books on HTML, PHP, MySQL, and basically anything related to web development.

Then I learned about the concept of content management systems. The idea really resonated with me because after years of writing HTML by hand, I liked the idea of a system that could be used to reuse my code so that adding a new page just amounted to filling out a form online. I found Mambo in 2003 when I need to build a site for the company I was working for at the time, and I was hooked. I spent countless hours reading tutorials and asking questions in the forums to learn as much as I could about this new (to me) system.

In the years that followed, I continued reading, learning, and trying new things with Mambo and then Joomla after the Mambo/Joomla split in 2005. For the past few years, I've been on the other side of the learning equation. Now I'm the one teaching others about Joomla, through my book, tutorials on the web, forums, Joomla Days, and teaching classes through OS Training.

The truth of the matter is, though, I know enough about Joomla and web development in general to know that there is a lot more that I don't know and a lot that I may never know. Web development is not a static field. Things don't just stay the same so that everyone can catch up and learn all of it. Things change all the time. New technologies emerge. New versions of PHP come out that change the programming paradigm for PHP developers. New versions of Joomla come out that change how we have done things for years. New database systems emerge that make us question the relational database (SQL) dogma that has prevailed for as long as I can remember.

There will always be something new to learn, and if you are complacent in your current knowledge and understanding of things, you will become stagnant and irrelevant to the ever changing world. As a self-proclaimed "Joomla Expert" I have to continually strive to grow and learn more about Joomla and never be content with my current level of knowledge and understanding. You will never know everything there is to know, but there will always be something new to learn that can help you be better and more efficient at what you do.