Professional Biography

Last Updated (Saturday, 04 October 2008 04:29)

In the past ten years or so, I've been employed as a web developer and jack of all trades in the web industry. I've built web sites, managed teams that developed web sites, worked with and done QA and project management, learned about to manage servers and become quite handy with databases, and learned a fair amount about writing.

I enjoy working in a small team environment, work equally well with technical and non-technical people, and can work quite effectively all by my lonesome. Much of my most recent web development work has been on a contract basis with direction from a creative lead. Most of my recent work has been done on behalf of Zango Creative.

My interest in computers started at a young age where I was enthralled by the possibilities of early home computers like the TRS-80, the Commodore PET (and later the C-64) and the Apple IIe. It wasn't until much later that I went to work for Pacific Northwest Bank, a local bank so small at the time that the Accounting Department was also the IT department. So, even though I was officially an accounting clerk, I also got to learn some of the inner workings of a Novell network with both PCs and Macintoshes, the wonders of vt100 terminal emulators, and the myriad non-standard uses of Excel and Access.

One thing led to another and I discovered the joys of bulletin boards and then the internet through friends employed at companies like Zombie Interactive and Multicom. My old Packard Bell 286 had metamorphosed into a home-built 386 when the World Wide Web started to take off.

An interest in the web and some self-taught HTML led to a job at Ark Interface, a Packard Bell/NEC subsidiary, working on a site called Planet Oasis. That site, running on Microsoft IIS servers to take advantage of the existing programmers' knowledge of C++, led to me learning the rudiments of IIS, ISAPI dlls, some C++ and a fair amount of object-oriented design and programming concepts. Since Planet Oasis was essentially a graphic-based portal with sites arranged by category it became necessary to learn Corel Photopaint (and later, Adobe Photoshop) to do image mapping and editing. As time went by, my job description grew to include updating custom content for the site, creating daily pages from Excel and Perl, and writing computer game reviews. We also found time to learn everything there was to know about channels for Microsoft IE 4.0 and their new implementation of DHTML, as well as building a custom version of Planet Oasis for Sega (as Sega Netlink City for the Saturn game console to ship with its new modem).

The bulk of my experience with e-commerce sites and managing web developers came during my three years with Food.com. I began by learning Apple's WebObjects and how to create templates using back-end functionality created by the team of developers there. Having mastered that and learned SQL to work with the Sybase back-end, the company changed tactics and decided to migrat the entire site to Java with an Oracle database. In between, we found time to redesign the site five times with completely new HTML and graphics and new back-end functionality to meet the constantly changing needs of marketing and business development groups for surveys, co-branded sites, custom pages, promotional pages and much more. By the time I left, I discovered that I had learned and coded my fair share of Java, mastered Java Server Pages, learned Struts with Jakarta/Tomcat, learned how to show siteflow and behavior using both Visio and Rational Rose, learned other tools like Toad to work with the Oracle database and plenty of IDEs, and more besides. In many ways, even though the hours were long and recognition sometimes slow in coming, this was nearly my ideal job because of the sheer volume of technology I learned and was exposed to, not to mention the incredible people I got to work with and learn from.

I spent much of 2003 working on the XBox title Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge as a game designer. I worked on contract at Microsoft for FASA Studios. The hardest part of the job was the learning curve since I had to get up to speed on MAYA, the various internal tools (version control, bug reporting, and XBox ultilities), and Visual Studio .NET. Much of the configuration and other files were handled using XML, so I got some excellent exposure to the ways this technology could be used in an area other than web applications. I also got to develop some Excel sheets for dialogue for use in missions and for localization. I particularly enjoyed working with MAYA and writing Mel scripts.

I followed that contract with another one at Microsoft after a hiatus. This contract was with Microsoft Game Studios working on Forza Motorsport. As a fan of Gran Turismo for the Sony Playstation, it was great to work on a triple-A title like this. My primary design role was creating the races and career progression, combining cars and tracks to maximize the challenge and fun. I created an Access database to manage the information and wrote a tool with C# to generate the XML configuration files for the game.

When a contracy opportunity at Adobe came along, I went directly from working as a game designer to working as a QA Engineer on Creative Suite 2. As part of the team that tested the integration and workflow, I focused on testing the web aspects of the product flow, particularly working on GoLive. I also got to test installations of various localized versions and with a variety of ooperating systems including Windows and the latest OS X seeds.

Since it was a contract, I was happy to land a full-time Web Developer position at Group Health Cooperative. Initially, I spent the first few months in training, learning to use Vignette's Portal and Content Management products. I then worked on developing the user interface for Group Health's Broker site redesign and various portlets used on the site. Most recently, I have been working on developing a new site for Employers who contract with Group Health as part of an team using Agile methodology. The work has involved building a site with Dynamo JHTML pages, building Teamsite forms to generate content XML and developing the front-end for J2EE servlets.