About
Early Decisions
When I first found Netscape Composer at the age of 13 I instantly fell in love with the idea of becoming a web designer, when I was on the computer at home I was usually either reading about how to make web sites or attempting to make them in Composer. When I started High School I decided to major in Graphic Design Technology and somehow ended up minoring in Media Communications. My major let me learn the basics of graphic design and have specific web projects that needed to be made, while in my freshman year I was briefly in a after school club that was “redesigning” the school web site. In the club we used Composer as Netscape Navigator was the default browser installed on the computers, this version of the site ended up as a frameset that was simple but lacking. By the time I started my first web class in sophomore year I had purchased an educational edition of Macromedia Studio MX which let got me started using Dreamweaver instead of Composer and I was learning more about HTML. Knowing HTML came in handy as this web class required us to use Notepad to create projects, I did pretty well in that class and it was my favorite one of the year.
When I started my Junior year I didn’t have my “advanced” web class until the second semester and I was basically just playing around with Dreamweaver on things and reading more books on topics, I even at one point had a book on ASP that thankfully I couldn’t get anything working out of. When I started the second semester I had my web class, but I also managed to get an internship redesigning the school website. The web class was easy until I had an issue with one of my projects not working correctly, we we’re using IE 6 as that was the new default browser on all of the computers and I’m sure it was an issue with it as I didn’t have any issues in Frontpage’s preview (yeah, the intro class used Notepad and HTML and the “advanced” one used Frontpage). The internship went really well, I was given complete creative control over the web site and I turned out a really nice consistent site for that year replacing the one I had helped build in my freshman year.
During my senior year I also had an internship where I redesigned the school web site, making it really simple and easy to find information. So, the entire time I was in high school I was involved in at least part of the school web site. During this year I also focused on my Media Communications minor, having taken the prerequisite “Communications Technology” course in my freshman year as an elective I was able to take the television production courses. The one thing about these classes are they have a intro and an advanced course, well I was able to take the advanced one first as it was only offered during the first semester. I love web development, but if I hadn’t pursued it I probably would have pursued a career in television/video production probably as an editor. During the advanced class we created and ran a student talk show as a class, with everyone having a hand in the production, editing and costuming.
A surprising fact is that I wanted to be a web designer, but couldn’t draw very well be it on a computer or on paper. I also wasn’t a very good math student, I couldn’t stand it and my first experience with actual programming was on a TI-83 graphing calculator. In middle school I used the answers in the back of the book to write a program that would give me the correct answer just by entering the information. It couldn’t be considered cheating as we were allowed to use calculators to do the work. In high school I did the same thing, but I had to make the program show the work since teachers were requiring that; again calculators were allowed but in retrospect it left me with poor math skills. I just couldn’t see how math would help me and I figured if I needed to do math in “real life” I’d use a calculator, no one would make me do math by hand.
College
After trying community college for a semester I knew it wasn’t for me, it was full of basic classes and wasn’t going to really help me. I’d learned about semantics, accessibility and PHP during the end of high school and over the summer. There were sites that helped me immensely such as PlasticPilots, Kaliber10000 and StyleGala. In high school we had a individual from a art college come in and show us what the school was offering in video, motion and graphic design. After the miserable semester at the community college I finally had the chance to go to the school although family wanted me to consider the Art Institute of Washington as it was closer, the reason I chose to instead go to Bradley Academy for the Visual Arts in PA was because it didn’t require the general courses in math, science, English and history.
Bradley (now known as The Art Institute of York PA) was also a two-year school so I would be done in half the time. I opted for their Digital Arts degree instead of the web degree as I knew most of the stuff in it and wanted to better my art skills and understanding of how design works. What’s interesting here is I had finally figured out that I didn’t want to be a designer, but a developer. I graduated from Bradley Academy in June 2007 with a Associate in Specialized Technology degree.
Work
Shortly before graduation I started working at a small web studio in Elizabethtown, PA as a part-time Junior Web Developer where I was responsible in updating existing client’s PHP & MySQL sites. Once I graduated I was promoted to a full-time Web Developer where I was given more responsibility including working on new client projects, interactive development with Flash and Payment Gateway Integration; this is also where I was first introduced to MVC frameworks like CodeIgniter.
By 2008 I had moved into a Senior Web Developer role where I was managing freelance developers and helping plan projects. This positioned also gave me the chance to build a custom content management system to replace our existing commercial CMS. As more things were added to the CMS, it started to become unwieldy due to additions that attempted to make it more like other CMS’s we had experience with. I designed and developed version 2.0 at night during my free time that completely stream lined the user experience.
In January 2010 I left that job and moved back to Maryland to freelance full-time, over the last few years I’ve taught myself Objective-C, Java, Ruby and Python which has allowed me to build iPhone, iPad and Android apps, Ruby projects on Sinatra and Rails that make my work easier and Python projects with Django that make creating client admin sections quickly. I’ve also had the opportunity to learn more about database and server administration, including replication and the LAMP stack.
Next
Now, after almost two years of freelancing I’ve started a iOS and Web development company focused on creating products that cleanly and clearly solve problems called Simple App Group LLC.