Me

My story begins in a dinky one stop light town in western New York on a very cold stormy Febuary night. Like most the men in my family I was born with mechanical abilities. When I grew up and became interested in computers my mechanical pattern of thinking became a real asset.

After graduating from the Art Institue of Pittsburgh with a Associate in Specialized Technology I came back home and began my job search. I got my first job in a small print shop called J&K Photgraphics as a graphic artist. After two years of building my portfolio and gaining valuable work experience I began my move toward applications developer with a new job at Stargate. After awhile of working with basic HTML I was thown into a project where I had to learn a new language, Coldfusion. After asking lots of questions and figuring the whole database thing out I began to learn quickly and developed a classifieds site teaching myself as I went. Stargate became a pivitol part in my development but as ISP's go it wasn't long before they made cuts and my team was left unemployed. I began to search for a new job and as I was searching people who heard of my layoff began to contact me. Soon I was looking for full time employment half the day and freelancing the other half.

After a few months I got a call from an advertising agency, Engel Fritts Hanna & O'Neill. I began working half days as a contract employee but this time I had a little more responsabilities. I started maintaining 20+ workstations and 3 servers ontop of developing web applications. Those mechanical skills I spoke of earlier began to kick in as I started to teach myself everything inside and out about these computers. My programming skills grew also as for the first time I was left on my own with no senior developer to ask if I had and issue. I began to hash out my own issues and started learning more about CFML. To help me learn more about Linux and Unix I decided to install a copy of mandrake on a spare system I had at home. After awhile I began to administer to linux server with no problems. This was truly a great job I learned so much but as it goes the partners decided to split.

Left with a tough decision I decide to go with Gary Fritts and Bill Hanna to Fritts & Hanna. This was an exciting venture because I got to be in more of a authoritive postion and I also got to try my hand at building a Mac/PC network from ground up. During my time with Fritts & Hanna I've learned tons and written everything from Coldfusion, PHP, ASP, Perl to Visual Basic.

I'm not sure if this will last forever but I hope if I do get another job it will be as interesting.