There are few things I love more on the internet that seeing what helps peoples’ digital lives tick. This is my attempt to share my little corner of the internet.
My career as I know it started way back in 1995. I designed and built my first website that year… using Microsoft Word. It was awful. Later that same year, though, I had my first paying job as a freelance web-designer — $50 from a local church music group for a website full of frames, tables, and font tags. Of course, I was 12 at the time and didn’t know any better. Now, 15 years later, the fundamentals of what I do haven’t changed and neither has how much I love doing it. Fortunately for me (and for my career), I’ve given up the font tags and tables for CSS and semantic HTML and even picked up a few server-side languages.
Presently my focus is on front-end web development emphasizing standards, accessibility and the end-user experience. I constantly strive for pixel perfect implementations, highly flexible and reusable code and the highest quality craftsmanship for all of my work. ExpressionEngine is my platform of choice for building responsive, scalable, and easily maintainable websites and I turn to Django for building custom web applications.
I currently reside in Boulder, CO and am a happily employed Senior Front-End Developer for Viget Labs as well as a part-time freelance web developer.
Gear
Most people that know me say I have at least a few to many computers. Honestly, I can’t argue with that. I’ve got a soft spot for Apple and Canon and rarely more than arms length away from a device connected to the Internet.
For work I use a Unibody 15-inch MacBook Pro hooked up to a shiny new 27” Apple Cinema Display.
At home, the center of everything is a 27” quad core iMac with 16GB of RAM side-by-side with and absurdly wonderful 30” Apple Cinema Display. In addition to that a Mac Mini hooked up to a glorious new Panasonic plasma and a few old Mac laptops kicking around for no other reason than not being able to get rid of them.
All of my media gets served from a Thecus N5200 Pro with 10TB worth of drives stuffed in it hooked up to a Airport Extreme that blankets my home in WiFi.
For those times when I’m on the go I’ve got a 16GB iPad (courtesy of the wonderful folks at Viget), an Amazon Kindle when I want to do serious reading and a Canon 60D which easily eclipses every other camera I’ve owned to date.
All of my keyboards are Macally and my mice are Razer.
Oh, and of course I have an iPhone 3GS with me at all time.
Tools
Good hardware is nothing without good software. I do my best to keep a fairly limited set of tools at my disposal and all have been heavily customized to my process at this point.
All of my code, articles and even to-do lists are written in TextMate. I browse the internet with Safari. Version my code with Git and Github. Read my feeds with NetNewsWire. Perform backups with SuperDuper. Chat through Adium. Manage photos with Aperture. Move files with Transmit. See what people are talking about with Twitteriffic. Dump everything I find into Yojimbo. Forced to use Photoshop.
And my life is in the hands of Dropbox.
The Site
This site’s design is a heavily modified version of the Information Architects’ iA3 Wordpress Theme running on ExpressionEngine and hosted at Linode.
I have a serious crush on Django for building web apps and couldn’t live without Linode to host them.