My name is Michael Babker, and I would like to thank you for visiting my site. A little about myself. I was born in 1986 and am a member of the Class of 2005 from Sarasota High School in my hometown of Sarasota, Florida. I am a Sergeant in the United States Army and serve as an Information Technology Specialist. Since I enlisted, I have been stationed in Korea, the United States, and Germany, and have deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. I am also a part time college student and in December 2011, earned my Associates of Arts in Information Technology with a concentration in Web Design.

As far as web design and development are concerned, I've done it as a hobby since 2003 with basic HTML and CSS. Only since my first Joomla! installation in February 2010 have I gone on to expand my knowledge and branched into additional programming languages. Since that first installation, there's been no looking back. I've contributed hundreds of hours in work on Joomla! 1.6+ with the Joomla! Bug Squad, tackling a variety of issues from misspellings to ACL bugs. From there, I branched out on my own, and in August 2010 I released my first extension, Tweet Display Back. Now, I am working on Podcast Manager, a suite of extensions to allow for easy podcast management in Joomla! 1.6, plus Yet Another Social Plugin, which is just a simple plugin to add social media links to Joomla! articles, all while maintaining Tweet Display Back, doing what I can to continue supporting the core Joomla! code, and sharing code with the Joomla! community.

In my down time, I enjoy traveling, biking, swimming, and all in all just relaxing.

Awards & Recognitions

Throughout the course of my military career and the time I've spent working with Joomla!, I've been recognized several times for outstanding accomplishments.  Listed here are just a few of those:

• US Army Signal Center and Fort Gordon Service Member of the Quarter - 1st Quarter, FY 2008
• Nominated for the 116th Military Intelligence Group Soldier of the Year - 2008
• Nominated for the USINSCOM Quality/Customer Service Award - 2010
• Joomla Open Source Creative and Artistic Recognition - GitHub Junkie Award, J & Beyond 2012