About Me
Starting in 1995 with notepad and HTML I spent most of my evenings and early morning coding away creating sites. Back then I had graduated from college and had my first real corporate job in engineering. Quickly figuring out that it was not the job for me I started dedicated more time to coding until eventually it paid off.
Sometime in early 1996 I got my first steady job where I spent the next two years coding. Back then it was all Unix, I had ditched notepad for PICO and a Unix prompt with live access to files. Who needs FTP right? Those where the days when Animated Gifs where new and cool, Pipe delimited text files were used for DB’s, Perl was the only way to do middle tier transactions and people still used Lime colored text with the Blink tag.
At some point in 1998 I got lured into working for the Magical World of Disney. Talk about a change of pace! No more editing live files or quick changes. Instead many long hours in meetings, QA, paperwork and forget Unix it was all IIS and ASP. But it was Disney and a great opportunity with several perks like a giant fridge with endless caffeinated soft drinks, parties on Fridays with catered food, deserts and drinks. This was all pre-bubble so sky was the limit and times where great!
I left Disney and spent the next couple of years with several different companies like USWeb/CKS (aka March First) and Snacki as the Bubble effect starting taking hold. The landscape was definitely changing as money dried up and companies went under. But hey I was a coder and a good coder is never out of work. Plus I did develop some cool games for NBC in Flash 4 for the television movie The Tenth Kingdom!
Around 2001 I joined a strong company called Homestore.com who’s online properties included Realtor.com in partnership with the NAR. I worked with several talented engineers who I still keep in contact with to this day. The highlight of my time spent at Homestore was working on the development of iLead an online publishing system which is very similar to today’s blogging platforms. With themes, custom listings integration and many more features it allowed real estate agents to have an easy to manage presentable site. XML and XSLT was the new thing to do and I was writing VB6 DLL’s and ASP between 12 to 16 hours a day. Homestore was a great place to be for an engineer until our CEO misstated earnings.
Disney once again called and I went back to work for the Mouse! This time even more perks like a Silver Pass and of course endless caffeinated beverages. A Silver Pass is great and what it does is allow you to go to any Disney theme park along with several guests when ever you want except black out dates at not cost. While at Disney I had the privilege of working on several great projects including the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland, the Walt Disney World Resorts and Park 2.0 site and My Disney Vacation which allowed guests to view Resort, Airline and Transportation information online. Did I mention that Disney has some great perks? Trips to Orlando with a free room the Yacht Club Resort, awesome food prepared by world class chefs and you get trained to become a cast member learning the Walt Disney Vision at the original Burbank Studios.
So now its 2006 and I am really burnt out on being a Corporate employee. I start reading a blog at Shoemoney.com and find out that there is something called Pubcon taking place in Las Vegas. Since the early days I had gone to tons of conferences in Vegas and knew deep down that this was what I needed to get me going again. One problem though I was between jobs and strapped for cash. So as you may have heard countless people say I took every last cent I had and gave it to Brett Tabke for a ticket to Pubcon.
Once in Las Vegas surrounded by countless entrepreneurs I finally felt at home. Of course I got to hang out with Shoemoney and met Brent, Derek, Cshel along with several others. More importantly I got to meet Greg Boser (aka Webguerrilla – Evil Black Hat SEO) and became a member of the Web Guerrilla team in 2007.
This last year has been a whirlwind of conferences, experiences and new friendships. I have a great job now working for and learning from Greg Boser and Dax Herrera. I still have several clients who have been with me over the years and on occasion take on extra projects on my off time with an eye towards joint venture projects.