about
At three years old, I learned how to read on a computer. I still have my first sentence saved on a 10-inch disk.
In 1994, I was introduced to PHP by a friend, my boss at the time, and immediately joined in working on Ty.com, Motley-Crue.com and Sears-Tower.com, along with several other interactive and e-commerce based websites. It was new, exciting and immediate. I was now able to build applications and deploy them in obscenely short time spans. We worked together for about a year before we parted ways.
I moved on to a company called MediaOne and participated in the rollout of the first cable-modems in the state of Illinois. While there, we were bought out by AT&T, who comissioned me to build an outage-tracking application that decreased outage response time by over 800%.
After AT&T, I tried my hand at college. At the time, there were no places of higher-education offerring anything related to my chosen field, so I picked the closest thing: a CIS major at DeVry. Nearly 2 years of teaching classes, trading professors websites for grades in remedial classes, collecting an array of Dean's List certificates and learning about mainframe languages I had no intention of ever utilizing were enough to force me to get out in the real world and carve my own path. Although some companies may look down on this, I have no regrets.
After DeVry, I moved up to Minneapolis to work for an interactive company, focusing most of my time on a dating website with over 300,000 active members. After completely rebuilding the dating website and migrating the content & user-base to a new database structure, I formed my own company handling web development and advanced engineering prototype designs. My young age and the economic downfall after 9-11 taught me a great deal about business and debt. Suffice to say, I moved back home to Chicago.
Chicago has brought many great opportunities and my knowledge and experience have grown in great strides. I have worked with small start-ups as well as Fortune-500 companies developing everything from small websites to advanced web applications with millions of lines of code.
At present, I am leading the team that is desinging a complete ground-up rebuild and re-branding of Price.com, as well as assisting the team planning the future for MacSales.com.
I absolutely love my work.