I’m a full stack developer that makes web sites and mobile apps. I specialize in Node, React, and React Native. I have dabbled in C#, Ruby, and Python, but my favorite language is JavaScript.
History
I started my career as a print designer around the time desktop publishing was taking off. At my first job at a newspaper, yes a newspaper, we used a bizarre combination of stone age physical paste up, complete with melted wax applied to cut out clip art and lettering, as well as the latest computer design software on high-end Apple hardware.
Fast forward about a decade and I became a front-end web designer/developer. This was the late 1990s and the transformative web technology was Flash. If you are not familiar with Flash, it used a proprietary scripting language called ActionScript to render vector art, animations, and multimedia on the web. It was interesting since it more or less replaced the messiness of HTML and CSS with the messiness of ActionScript, proprietary browser plugins, and the bandwidth limitations of the early internet. Fun times.
I dropped out of web design for about six years and got lost in the world of the back-end with .NET and SQL. When I finally reemerged, the front-end had dramatically changed! What was this thing called NPM? What are packages? And what the heck are Angular and React? It was really confusing to a web developer that used to manually upload homespun CSS, HTML, and JS files onto the server.
I learned to embrace the new way of doing things, which is essentially moving the back-end onto the front-end. But now it looks like there is a movement back to the “pure” front-end of times past. I kind of welcome it, but we’ll see what happens.
Contact
I can be reached on the Mastodon and Lemmy social media platforms. Feel free to send me a direct message.
