Who Am I?
People tend to define themselves by their professions. My path through the working world has been circuitous; these days I'm trying to re-define myself as a writer.
Most people who know me, know me as a "web developer", though I didn't settle on that particulara appelation until 1997 or so. I've been writing since fifth grade, and only working in computing (off and on) since 1991, when I landed help desk and software-training jobs at the University of Rochester. My "professional" computing work, all since 1996, has included website copy, technical writing, requirements analysis, webmastery, web development, solution design, software training, and desktop support.
I used to cringe at writers' bios, filled with casual references to serving as cultural attaché to Iceland, working passage to Indonesia on a garbage scow, and so on. A while back, I counted my jobs and discovered I had accumulated a writer's bio of my own, including (in some cases several) stints as a janitor, cook, secretary, library assistant, unwitting "big-con" flunkie, microcomputer jock, web-doyen, and unarmed security guard.
While I like to think I offer some resistance to the "virtual life", computing has worked its way into many corners of my personal existence. In recent years I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the relationship between individual people and computing technology, and in turn with the society in which people live and play.
Very recently, I have also been thinking about the nature and future of work and career, as we shift in fits and starts to a workforce organized around one or another form of contingent labor. In particular, I have been trying to find ways to help people reclaim more control over their own career paths and life-choices, instead of tacitly leaving them to be determined by employers or politicians.
Professional Profile
As a web developer, I have worked primarily in the Presentation Layer -- that is, I have been responsible for laying the groundwork for user experience from the output of business logic through the point of presentation in the browser. My work to date has included the front end for many of the sites in Element K's family of online offerings. More recently, I designed and built an extensible presentation layer for the Xelus corporate website that would permit their corporate marketing personnel to make sweeping changes to appearance and information architecture by modifying only a few library files. I later used that as the basis for a similar system in PHP that I used to drive several websites.
My interests in site development extend to all areas that touch on user interactions: Information architecture, information design, interaction design, site usability, and product development, to name a few.
If I have a specialty, it would be in producing low-overhead solutions to the problem of separating content from presentation. Put in practical terms, every dynamic site I've worked on since 1998 can be radically changed in appearance by editing only two to three files (typically a function library and a stylesheet), without the use of high-overhead transformation technologies like XSLT. I've also spent a great deal of time chasing down cross-browser incompatibilities and testing layouts for optimum rendering speed.