A scrawny scrapper grew up in the suburb of Dallas, Pa. Raised on organic food and very imaginative - I was kind of a weird kid. I grew up collecting comics, rollerblading and skateboarding, breaking and fixing computers, and being constantly fascinated with the latest technology.
School systems were always difficult for me to connect with. In grade school, most classes were too easy for me to give much attention. In high school, I found myself taking classes at another high school and a local college in order to focus on programming and gain experience in both C++ and Java (in addition to Pascal which was taught at my own school.) As I progressed through college, I saw my success getting defined by a flawed system and felt that cooperating with such a system was a compromise of my own values. After committing scholastic seppuku, I realized my convictions would be irrelevant in the real (business) world. Regardless of my personal battles, I graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh.
After school, I returned to my original habitat to help manage my parents' latest (at the time) venture, Mill Hollow Café. Mill Hollow started exclusively as an organic, vegetarian restaurant and has since expanded its menu to include wild fish, organic chicken, and grass-fed, organic beef. The cafe and our store, House of Nutrition, are constant encouragement to live a healthy life as well as being great influences on my work habits (instilling in me a sense of loyalty and heightening my natural love for "efficiency".)
Upon returning home, I also happened upon my super-cute Su. Typically she goes by the moniker Sioux, but out of brevity I use "Su"; out of irony, I then explain my decision. In addition to being really sweet to me, Su contributes most of the beauty, art, organization, and animals in my life these days.
My path of web development started with a few HTML tags handed down from my cousin, Josh. In my youth, I experienced the chaos of writing Javascript during the (Netscape vs. IE) browser wars; although browser incompatibility is still a beautiful headache, I've come a long way in terms of dealing with that strife.
Currently, I am a product engineer for the web design company Solid Cactus. Through Solid Cactus I've had the opportunity to work on almost 300 websites (many of which I programmed from start to finish.) These e-commerce sites ranged from "mom & pop shops" to large corporations. I'm most proud of several of our white-glove clients' sites which I was fortunate enough to be able to build from scratch (such as What She Buys, Starry Night, Everlast, etc.)
Since the creation of our product development department, I have had the opportunity to release patches and updates for most of Solid Cactus' product line and build two brand new features. The first feature I developed is Snap Shop - one of the company's most popular products. The second, MiniCart (which was just recently released), is surely one of the most complicated and tricky projects I've ever worked on. During the development of MiniCart, I was also tasked to rewrite and redefine a standard framework which all of our Javascript features will use as a base - providing faster/easier development and cross-feature integration.
Each new experience at work continues to challenge my programming skills - especially on the Yahoo! store platform where it seems like I'm constantly attempting to overcome the impossible. In my free-time, I'm always experimenting with new languages and digital technology in general; at least until I start getting dirty (neglected) looks from Su [yes, I love you more than the computer.]