I am a web programmer with an extensive background in PHP, Javascript, XHTML and CSS. My specialty lies with dynamic, accessible applications built on the LAMP platform with a focus on current standards compliance.

My programming experience began at age 8 when I received my first computer, a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. I remember spending days of writing hundreds of lines of Basic with loads of ‘goto’ statements, just to manage mundane tasks such as keeping baseball statistics and remembering family birthdays.

In Jr. High, our computer lab was considered state-of-the-art with Apple IIe’s. There we learned how to program for the plotter and use the Logo language to control the Turtle robot to draw patterns on the floor. I spent many days in that classroom enjoying a game of “Below the Root” or “Kings Quest“.

Our High School had a similar computer lab, and it wasn’t until my Senior year that I entered into the programming class there. One of the many projects we did involved plotting the Mandelbrot Set 1 pixel at a time on the screen. Our classroom computers could render the entire Set in about 16 hours. By that time, I had an Apple IIgs at home, which could render the entire screen in about 6 hours. My final project, which was allotted the entire 4th quarter, was to write “Conway’s Game Of Life“. Three days later, I was done and spent the rest of the quarter honing my skills with anything else the instructor could throw at me.

My web programming experience didn’t begin until my second year in the Air Force when I took on the challenge of redesigning my Unit’s web site. I jumped right in to dynamic programming by using rollover images on the index page. I began Flash/Actionscript programming shortly after when I attended the Flashforward conference in San Francisco the year Flash MX was introduced. One of my projects involved building a Jabber client in Flash that not only passed text messages, but allowed users to collaborate a drawing on a canvas by passing x,y and color information over specially coded Jabber messages. As I was working on that project, I decided to try handling data connections to store drawing data and keep a log of messages. My research led me to finding PHP. After a few months of experimenting with PHP, I dropped Flash in favor of DHTML, due to the ease of incorporating client-side and server-side technologies without the need for an expensive, proprietary development environment. By this time, I was already heavily into Linux as my OS of choice and was looking for ways to eliminate any dependencies on Microsoft. When a coworker sold me his old gaming tower, a Pentium 486, I build my first LAMP server and began to really develop dynamically.

In college, I avoided the web classes and pursued languages such as Assembly, C, and C++. Since the school I attended only offered basic web classes, I opted for the heavier languages to improve my programming skills. Near the end of the semester in Assembly, I revisited an old favorite by convincing the instructor to teach us how to program Conway’s Game of Life in C (he wasn’t even amused when I asked if he could show us how in Assembly). One of my favorite classes to date was Data Structures in C. It taught me a lot about efficiency and problem solving, no matter how complicated the task.

To this day, I am still a strong supporter of free and open technologies and love programming for the web for that very reason. I have been developing for the web professionally since 2006 and have gained exponential amounts of experience in that time. I am lucky to work with others that have a passion for web development and am grateful to have the opportunity to pass on to them my knowledge and ideas.