programmer
designer
With 22 years of experience, it’s hard to find an area of web development where I have not been deeply involved. Freelancing gives me the opportunity to learn and participate in every aspect of building websites and applications. Design, programming, hosting, project management and maintenance all come with handling a project from start to finish.
I’m mostly self taught starting with HTML my senior year in high school back in 1999. I wanted to customize my AOL webpage to my liking. From there I just kept learning.
“I have no special talents.
– Albert Einstein
I’m only passionately curious.”
I started learning PHP in 2001 and began building sites for clients as quickly as I could. I went to college for Graphic Design in hopes to one day move into 3D Animation. That path ended when I realized my brain is wired to write code. I enjoy the ability to switch between design and development, but creating things from scratch out of code is where I excel most.
I eventually got tired of writing everything from scratch and began learning about PHP Frameworks. I looked at CakePHP, Symfony, and Zend, but eventually settled on CodeIgniter. This change really pushed me in a better direction as a developer. I decided to base a CMS I had been building for a few years using CI.
I eventually got tired of maintaining my own CMS and discovered WordPress. I had used WordPress, but never really dove into it until about 13 years ago. WordPress gives me the ability to get in and start working almost immediately without dealing with all the mundane details of the functionality behind everything. There’s an amazing community behind this software and a ton of plugins! I have yet run into a project that it couldn’t handle.
What does the future hold? I’m always interested in learning and new challenges. I hope I can continue to stay on the cutting edge and hopefully someday be ahead of it.