My career in Web Development grew from an early, direct interest in computers and how they work.  The Apple IIe… what fond memories.  I broke the family Windows 3.1 computer on a couple occasions and then read the manual to disable the BIOS password afterward since I wasn’t allowed to use it anymore.  When I was about 17 I had a 3 computer Windows 95 network in my bedroom, using those fancy coaxial 10base2 Thinnet network cards.  At the time I was volunteering at the local computer store after school and picked up quite a number of things there and even had the rare opportunity to teach a thing or two.

Since then I have helped friends, family and coworkers with countless PC (and some mac) issues.  I was one of two assistants at one of my high schools to the school network admin.  I worked at a couple PC repair shops too, back then I was all about help desk level support for the most part.  I tested PC games with Electronic Arts and Sierra On-Line for a few years then landed a job at a small electronics store that was in need of someone to get pictures of their products onto their e-commerce website.

As I got more comfortable I was able to take responsibility for many of their computer and network related needs and significantly update their website.  It was at that store where I was able to learn about scripting and logic in a setting where there was very little pressure for it, I was able to take on new responsibilities at my leisure.  I understood HTML and CSS at the time but never had a need to dive into it much until I had a project that needed attention in that area.  From there I dove into their store pages, written in PHP, got familiar with and created a lot of JavaScript/AJAX, improved and wrote many SQL queries and started to do some freelance on the side.  By the time I had picked up all that their website was not only finally generating revenue but was actually making a profit.

In 2007-2009 I picked up ColdFusion and a handful of JavaScript libraries, standards and tools like YUI, JSON, TAFFY and Sorttable.  I’ve been developing websites for about some 5 years now and I’ve had the opportunity to work with some great companies, coders, designers and project managers.