Profile

for Johnny

The favorable place in which I find myself today began the summer of 1998 when living in Chicago, where I landed my first contract to design a small law firm's website. A hobby born out of curiosity only a couple of years earlier had serendipitously blossomed into a profession capable of embodying my interests and ideology. In that short period I also developed an appreciation for what a website should be, a coalescence of logic and creativity resulting in utility and elegance, not merely code and content.

I view a website as a work of art, crafted into something appreciated, something of value. Formulation of an experience dependent not upon technical skills alone, but also on a host of commensurate disciplines, articulated through an approach deliberative of the audience that avail themselves of it, their purposes for using it, the tasks they complete on it, the contexts in which they employ it, and the paths they take through it.

Leading up to my modest beginning as a web professional, I ventured down a few other career paths: firefighter, paramedic, combat medic (US Navy, assigned to Fleet Marine Forces), pharmacy technician (planning on medical school), and law clerk. Notwithstanding the cameo serving subpoenas and filing briefs, there is commonality amongst these positions that aids the success in my present role: empathy.

This quality and other properties weave the fabric of my character, permitting me to fulfill end-user desires, website objectives, and business goals:

• Knowledge allows me to grasp the perspectives and realities of business and technology, and to bridge the divide that separates the two.
• Experience supplies me the technical expertise to produce, interpret, and transform documentation into prototypical and production code.
• Tenacity and ethics brings with me discipline, accountability, and high commitment.

These constituents all are demonstrable in my work, spanning private, local, state, and federal sectors, contributing to projects for USAA, Security Service Federal Credit Union, the US Air Force, the State of Texas, and others.

What was once a pastime remains my most favored pursuit over a decade later. It's what gets me up in the morning, keeps me from going to bed at night, and why I cannot will not find the time to do much else. Building the Web is a passion, or more accurately, an obsession.