About
I always had this section listed on my website but I don’t think I’ve ever actually gotten around to writing it. There’s a few reasons, one because what can I possibly sum up on one page about myself.
I’m lots of things in life, a dj, a computer geek, and a car guy, rolled into one. I work full time as a web developer / dba admin / tech guy, and by night spin house music as a dj. I have a problem with buying parts for my car, and love riding the hills on my snowboard in the winter. I’m a non drinker / smoker by choice, and that’s me in a nutshell. To break it down some more, here’s a bit more of an unabridged version
Coder
I grew up a problem solver. I always wanted to take things apart and see how they work from my GI Joes to my Transformers. My uncles had a Commodore 64 they would rarely let me use so instead while they were sleeping, I’d sneak on it and load of Karateka or Kung Fu and play them in all their glory. I always wanted a computer and one of my best friends, Aaron Teske had one. We’d mess around with it into the early hours of the morning trying to learn about it. On a fateful Christmas Saturday morning my life changed forever. Luckily, my Dad loved me enough to drive south 2.5 hours to Minneapolis to purchase a Packard Bell 486sx computer. 25mhz and 4 megs of blinding power. I did lots of great things with that computer. There were hours upon hours spent on Prodigy which thankfully my parents didn’t disconnect after the first $75 bill. I started learning Dos, and adapted what I learned from Mr. Swanson in my Junior High Programming class to adapt what I knew about Apple Basic to work in QBasic. From there I moved on to Turbo Pascal which was really the big thing that hooked me.
I spent hours upon hours coding. The sad thing is that I don’t have much to show for it. A lot of my time learning on the computer was split from spending it on IRC talking with BBS modding crews and different art groups. I developed a style with ascii art and joined a group called the Creators of Intense Art (CIA). All the while developing an ansi editor I had named Apathy. After a hard drive crash, I lost the code for it but thankfully learned lots from it. In the summer of 1996, Brandon and I took a class at the Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College called Introduction to Web Design. It was here I fell in love with the web. I had written thousands of lines of code in Pascal and could show an application to my mom and would just be given a “that’s nice”. There really was no real world use for the stuff I was working on but the web was so visual. It was live and easy to create something and receive a much higher impact.
I spent lots of time dabbling with writing bash cgi scripts as well as PERL trying to make sense of this new found phenomenon. I still remember a conversation with my Mom telling her one day the web would be so big that every company would have a web site. Meanwhile in school at this point I was taking Post Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) classes at the college through high school. Both Brandon and I were taking C++ and Java courses learning more about application development. Sadly I never caught on to OOP back then and wish I had. I was also working for the Superior School District where I began to learn PHP. It was a rather simplistic language that allowed for lots of flexibility with web development. I found the online community to be much more helpful than the PERL community which enabled me to learn at a much more accelerated rate. At this point I was developing a content management system for the school district where teachers could create and manage their own individual sites. Posting what classes were learning, homework assignments, etc. The easiest way I can describe it is that it was a myspace for teachers within our district. If only I had the foresight to adapt it into something else way back then.
With all this I began development on one of my biggest failures and successes, Vorpal. Vorpal was a content management system that was meant to be the silver bullet of web applications. A modular system where you could build your website including certain modules. Be it a content module, a forum module, polling, etc. I was originally working on this with Andrew Bell as a designer. After 3 revisions, I fell to the ultimate productivity killer and had found a girlfriend. When I left the School District, my development time went down considerably and this became a failed project. Someday I’d like to revisit Vorpal and maybe do revision 4. To this day, a lot of revision 2 still runs on www.lit.org but with numerous modifications of Chrispian Burks.
Eventually my career path took me to Irresistible Ink where I began to truly learn programming in a corporate world. I worked there as a developer, working mostly with Microsoft Access and doing VBA scripting. Along with this, I taught myself Visual Basic and was writing small applications to automate our tasks doing data transformations and preparing them for our data cleansing software. I learned a lot from the team there and really miss working with them. We were a cohesive unit that looked out for each other and despite being the red headed stepchild of a Hallmark Subsidiary, I liked the job. Unfortunately, it didn’t really pay what I felt like I was worth and there were so many more job opportunities in Minneapolis.
For around 2.5 years I worked at Identix, the largest digital biometric company in the world. I loved all of the secondary functions of my job but despised the main portion of being a tier 1 tech support engineer. I spent lots of time however writing KSH and Bash scripts to automate things on our old SCO Unix systems. Of course I kept PHP close to me and was developing a few web applications to help automate our badge identification system more.
This takes us to present day where I love the company I work for. I’m a PHP developer full time and finally get to work with the language that really hooked me. Along with this I support our MSSQL database so I’ve learned plenty about Microsoft’s giant database solution. I’m not quite sure where my future lies with programming, but I’ve learned that adapting is something I do quite well and can’t wait for the next challenge or language thats in my path. It’s just a matter of getting back to basics and doing more of what I love, problem solving.