Stefano Iacovella is a long-time GIS developer and consultant living in Rome, Italy. He also works as a GIS courses instructor, and he has a PhD. in Geology. Being a very curious person, he developed a deep knowledge of IT technologies, mainly focused on GIS software and related standards. Starting his career as an ESRI employee, he was exposed to and became confident with proprietary GIS software, mainly the ESRI suite of products. In the last 14 years, he has become more and more involved with Open Source software, also integrating it with proprietary software. He loves the Open Source approach and really trusts in the collaboration and sharing of knowledge. He strongly believes in the Open Source idea and constantly manages to spread it out, not limiting it to the GIS sector. He has been using GeoServer since release 1.5 by configuring, deploying, and hacking it on several projects. Other GFOSS projects he uses and likes are GDAL/OGR, PostGIS, QGIS, and OpenLayers. He is the author of the GeoServer Cookbook, which consists of a set of recipes to use GeoServer at an advanced level, by Packt, and he has also authored the first edition of this book. When not playing with maps and geometric shapes, he loves reading about science, mainly Physics and Maths, riding his bike, and having fun with his wife and two daughters, Alice and Luisa.
