Web Developer

My introduction to HTML, the language of the web, came in seventh or eighth grade computer class. I believe the assignment was fairly open-ended, simply create a website that had some relevance to your life. In that day and age, fan-sites for television shows were all the rage on the World Wide Web, so I created my own homages, first to Earth: Final Conflict, and later to Farscape. Me being me, my sites went far above and beyond the assignment's requirements, even so far as writing to 'real' fan sites on the web asking permission to borrow content for my school project.

In tenth grade, I took a computer graphic design class, which also featured an element of website creation. It was around this time I started learning how to use style sheets (CSS) to make my website's appearance more consistent, though I didn't really gain a firm grasp on this for several years. In eleventh grade I created a small site for our school's debate team, and then through a prodigous series of events, was hired the summer before my senior year to do maintenance on the official school website.

As an aside, it was around this time in high school that I also wrote programs for my TI-89 calculator and Palm Pilot.

With too much free time on my hands, and with special thanks to my friend Peter who ran his own web server, I created my first personal website and published it online. I don't remember the exact date that site went live, but it was sometime before my high school senior year (2003-2004). This site has seen numerous makeovers since then, evolving from a novelty "look at me I'm so cool" (you really can tell the nerds early, when they think having a website is cool...) to a marginally classier place where I can showcase my filmmaking work, and share a bit more about my life and what makes me tick.

In my junior year of college, I took a J-term class that taught me basic PHP + MySQL, tools used to serve dynamic web content. I became no expert in that class, but the introduction was enough that I could create a rudimentary PHP web app when I started working at my high school full-time after college graduation. My skills grew greatly from there. Most of what I know now I learned on the job, either because I had to or because I wanted to (I was very fortunate that those two reasons frequently overlapped).

Since that time I've created some pretty awesome web applications, as well as tools for Open Directory management, and user/group management with the Google Apps API. Each was a rather major accomplishment, and I'm rather proud of myself (if you know me, you know my standards for pride are pretty high). Eventually I hope I'll get around to posting my code, but... life is busy.