Sometimes classified as a hybrid of sorts

Hailing from Appomattox, Virginia — a two stop light town, best known for the place where the Civil War ended, for all those history buffs out there. I am best described as a pixel pusher, css wrangler and coding monkey. I’ve been told I am a rare breed by all the people I have worked with in that I can not only design, but apply that design to the conform to the strict standards of xHTML and CSS and also make it dynamic through programming languages. Apparently, it is hard to find people that can do all that and a bag of chips.

Education

I graduated from Virginia Tech in 2005 with a BFA degree concentrating in Graphic Design. Of course, that was not the program I started out in. I did a stint in the Computer Science department for a semester and a half before ultimately finding my creativity able to blossom at the art department. At the time, the art department had very limited web design classes, but what ones there were, I ate up and fell in love with. They helped satisfy my two sides, geekness and the creative monster. Needless to say, I had to self teach my self the programming languages besides basic HTML and CSS; luckily I am a sponge for that stuff.

Experience

So far, I have worked for design houses to startups over my semi-short career. Plenty of freelance work has filled the gaps when I have down time in the evenings. Music is my passion and have had the opportunity to work with the guys at Indierock Media which is now Reccenter for the past five years doing design and web development work for the record industry, branching out into social media and UX for iOS applications.

I got into the startup world through Real Travel — an online trip research and planning website where I was the Sr. Front-end Web Developer. In the role I was in charge of everything from concept and design work to user experience to finally implementing the designs into front-end code using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Working closely with the Ruby engineers on the team, I grew my knowledge and experience of the Ruby framework, Ruby on Rails.

Currently I am Software Engineer for Patch — a hyper local news site, focusing on the front-end directly.

Skill set

Over the years, my programming language of choice has jumped all over the map. From ASP.net to PHP and finally settling on Ruby on Rails — probably going to stick with that one for a good while. Of course there is also the HTML and CSS ability, but I also dabble in ActionScript and JavaScript as I have built my own suites using popular JS libraries.

Oh, I also like to write and shoot photography.