Denes Szekely fell in love with IT in 1980, while working on an IBM 360. He began his education pursuing Physics at the University of Bucharest. Though he started out taking a different route in his studies, he remained faithful to his passion for computing. Soon after graduating as a Nuclear Fuel Engineer, he continued his education and took a second degree in Computer Sciences. In 1988, he made the transition and dedicated his time fully to being an IT specialist.

He began at a government-owned IT company as programmer, team leader, system analysts and system admin. After the end of the communist era, he was one of the first to establish a private IT business.

From 1993 to 2004, Denes worked as the head of the IT Department for the city council of Csikszereda (Major Transylvanian - Romanian). In 1996 he decided to teach various IT disciplines (networking, security, HTML/CSS authoring, Internet communications) at one of the oldest universities of his home country, the Babes-Bolyai University.

As IT department head he pioneered the use of CAD/CAM and GIS techniques for local government agencies in Romania.

He has been building web pages since 1995 and continues to author/co-author or contribute to many of today's open source projects. One major contribution was the 9-year editorship of the http://dmoz.org project.

From November 2004 he quit his job and began to freelance full time. Since then he has created over 50 websites (totaling over 10.000 individual pages) and worked on over 350 sites from around the globe.

As a natural born believer in the gift economy he discovered Mambo early on, back in the days when the project was the only interesting alternative in the open source community.
The switch to Joomla was a natural step because of the power and freedom it provides to people.

Another natural progression was joining the Left Brain team.