I’m an Interactive Developer living in Portland, Oregon. I’ve been working in the tech industry for over 10 years, and have been working on web sites since 1998.
I started my career right out of high school, building computers for a small computer vendor in Lake Oswego, Oregon. All I had under my belt at the time was playing games and hanging out on BBSs on my parent’s 486 IBM PS/2, and a bit of experience on the high school newspaper running their network of Mac LCIIs and LCIIIs, and the Centris as the monster main computer. I learned everything I could about building computers, and eventually picked up speed on learning how networks and the Internet worked.
In 1997 I started working at another small computer vendor building computers and setting up networks, and eventually was recruited to start a small ISP in Oregon City in 1999. It doubled as an ISP and a web development shop, and there I worked on a few web sites while helping manage the network. The ISP was sold and I left to work at Darkhorse Comics, where I had a short stint as a web developer, working on darkhorse.com and their online e-commerce store Things From Another World.
After Darkhorse I worked at a company that was trying to build an innovative online medical record system. I worked there for a few years mostly managing their networks, where I picked up a lot of knowledge in Linux and Unix systems administration, and even helped start a small Portland Linux User Group. I also designed a couple sites for them, and built an online system to sell Informed Consents to clinics.
I eventually started a company with Justin Kistner called Portland Internet Company. We had worked together on a few projects in the past and ended up sharing the same office, and thought since we worked on everything together and shared the same space, why not form a company? We did work for clients like Gardenburger, Valerie Day, Pacific Foods, McKesson, db clay, and Sports Car Market. There I picked up skills doing standards compliant CSS and HTML, and bringing that knowledge into the web applications arena to create sites with administration tools as elegant as the front-end.
In 2006 I chose to part ways with Justin and go freelance for a while. During that time I worked with Sports Car Market and River Network, as well as started working with Jason Glaspey on the first incarnation of Unthirsty, a happy hour finder Google Maps mashup. Unthirsty actually led me to me current job at Instrument Marketing, a small web development shop here in Portland. Both Jason and I got hired on to help with projects for companies like Wieden+Kennedy, Burton Snowboards, Starbucks and Microsoft.
My passion is developing web sites, and everything that goes along with it: CSS, tweaking web servers to perform faster, making google maps mashups, writing shell scripts to automate tasks, making unobtrusive Javascript magic, creating web spiders…the list goes on forever.