About Me
I was born in Memphis, Tennessee but grew up in the Rocket City, Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville is also the Hockey Capital of the South so naturally I played ice hockey as a wee lad. My life would change when I got an Amiga 1000 in 1986. This is a machine that would have seduced even the most fussy Luddite. I learned to tinker and play and a career with computers and networks took off afterward. Little did I know that csh shell I loved so much on the Amiga was ported over from Unix. I would go on to run my own BBS and later jump onto the Internet in 1992.
I began taking computer science classes at the University of Alabama in Huntsville my senior year of high school, and then continued pursuing a computer science degree after I graduated from high school. I was a tad frustrated by the Pascal curriculum when everything I was doing outside of class was in C at the time. In 1993 I began working as a lab assistant in the computer science department and soaking up everything I could on Solaris 1.x/SunOS 4.1.x and the Irix machines. I began learning how TCP/IP and IPX/SPX networks worked. In 1994 I took my Unix/Internet enthusiasm into Huntsville’s first Internet Service Providers: nuance.com, interquest.com, garply.com and hiwaay.net. It was a thrilling time because everyone was enthusiastic about what could be done. There was no spam on Usenet or in email. Gopher servers were vanishing and being replaced by web servers. Netscape had just released their first browser. There I was at the beginning of the commercial Internet evangelizing it and showing people how to use it.
In 1996 I moved to Birmingham, Alabama to work with an ISP and systems integrator down there, Southern Network Services. It was there that my skills really took off. I broadened my networking know how learning how to setup Cisco, Ascend, Livingston, Shiva, and Gandalf network equipment over a variety of data services like ISDN, T1, Dial-up modem and Frame Relay. I also deepened my knowledge of the various commercial Unixes as well as FreeBSD and Linux. I built web based administration front-ends for all sorts of things. I began learning PHP, JavaScript and continued my work with Perl. I took my first steps into relational databases like Informix, mSQL and ultimately MySQL. I wrote my first Java applet that was used to schedule shipment of steel coils and interface with the companies AS/400 DB2 database.
In 1999 I moved to Dallas, Texas to work for BroadbandNow, a nationwide broadband provider. I worked with a group of about 15 people publishing a sort of online magazine for people with a high-speed connection. The idea was that this magazine would help sell the difference between dial-up and broadband. I worked with a group of writers, designers and videographers. I was the developer that built the system to publish their work. The platform was Windows and Vignette StoryServer. It is one of the best jobs I have ever had. When the company failed to IPO it ran out of money and laid everyone off in 2001.
Since then I’ve focused on freelance or contract work. In that time blogs exploded onto the scene and I felt as giddy with the possibilities as I had with BBSes in the late 1980s. When I’m not working on a project I play around with publishing ideas and blogs. I’ve worked at Cingular doing more Vignette StoryServer development. I worked for a year at Huntsville Hospital on their webmail cluster, and building a couple e-commerce sites. I most recently went to work at RD2 to focus on web standards and semantic markup, although I also developed a few internal applications in PHP and MySQL.
I find myself now focusing on Ruby on Rails for web application development, and bringing my semantic markup and web standards skills to new projects.