I am a Sun Certified Java developer with broad experience in all things Web 2.0 including but not limited to search engine marketing and optimization, semantic markup, web standards, microformats, CSS, and JavaScript with AJAX. I am fascinated by social software and networking, information architecture, interactive and user oriented design, the blogosphere, and the proliferation of metadata through microformats, open web API’s, and techniques like geotagging. I have concentrated experience in applying Web 2.0 and open source methodologies and technologies to the e-commerce arena through custom application development and the customization of IBM WebSphere Commerce. I am customer oriented and comfortable communicating through the written or spoken word. I love to be on the bleeding edge of technology and development, and am more than comfortable leading and teaching others. I thrive in a team, and enjoy the social and technical aspects of working for a small company.
I am a web-programmer. I am language agnostic; I am positive I can code in anything and I will gladly work with PHP, Python, Ruby, or Java. I will not, however, work with Microsoft.Net on the auspices that it is against my religion as a web standards evangelist. I love to code, but I definitely thrive on the web client side with HTML/CSS and JavaScript being my specialties and most of the topic of this blog.
I’m married and as of February 2008, a father of one. We live in a 100+ year old home in North Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, in the United States. I work for a small-but-growing software services shop in near-by Allentown, PA. This area is known as the Lehigh Valley, it’s about an hour away from both New York City and Philadelphia and I’ve lived here practically my entire life, except for a 1-year stint in Rochester, NY at RIT. On occasion I pretend to be a photographer, an artist, an actor, and a construction worker; I hold my own on all of these things but I am by no means an expert.
About This Blog
This blog has existed in many forms since roughly October of 2000, it started on LiveJournal, lived at CSH for a while, did a brief tour of duty on Blogger, and has now found a permanent home here. I try to write daily on weekdays but usually manage about three posts a week. This site was built on a Mac using Coda, it runs on Wordpress, and it’s all hosted on Dreamhost. Eventually I will finish the theme for this site and actually post some of my personal projects, until then, I suggest you just subscribe to the RSS feed and I’ll be sure to let you know when everything is done. It may never happen, but I’m assuming you’re just here for my content anyway so content is my priority.
Want To Work With Me?
Here’s where it gets interesting. I like my job; at least I try and tell myself that every day. It’s pretty much the best there is in the Lehigh Valley, and I’m not too keen on relocating to San Francisco or Seattle or commuting to New York or Philly. If that does not disqualify you from working with me, you think what you do is more interesting than what I’m doing now, and you think you can afford me, please feel free to contact me for a resume or check my LinkedIn profile. Be aware that I would not be opposed to working remotely if your company has the infrastructure to support it, in fact I would probably jump at the chance. I currently work for a waterfall shop and am not to thrilled with it; I’d love to try agile or xp, but I think most of this stems from wanting to try product or service development as opposed to for-client development. At this time I’m not interested in working for free or for equity; I have enough side projects of my own. This may change in the future, but right now I need a paycheck.
Another option for working with me is a running offer that I have open to anyone with money and a willingness to listen. If you pay my salary and benefits for a year I will gladly give you a 49% share in whatever I can come up with. The sky’s the limit for your own ideas (assuming I believe it can be profitable in a year), and I have quite a few ideas of my own if you just have some cash to invest. Eventually I will own my own company, this is just the most plausible way to do it at this stage in my life.
The final option for working with me is through my writing. I will gladly accept copies of Mac software or books to review on this site, assuming they’re within my areas of interest and on-topic for this site. I would be willing to exchange links if your site is relavant to my topic, and I am more than interested in exchanging guest posts. I’m not interested in having my content re-published unless you can meet the following criteria: I get paid (amount is negotiable), the re-post itself is no-indexed, and there is a followed link back to my site. I suppose this criteria is negotiable, but that will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. I am very interested in writing for print, so if you’re interested in what I have to say and you have a book deal or a magazine article for me to write, feel free to drop me a line. I’m also not opposed to speaking, so if you’re running a conference and would like me to present, I’m up for that as well.
