All About Me
Getting to know me
I am a senior at The Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago, IL. I recently graduated from with a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree in Web Design and Interactive Media. I am now a web developer at Critical Mass, an web development firm located in downtown Chicago. When I'm not working I still usually have my head in a web development book. What can I say? Web sites are my passion.
My Background
Since I was 11 years old, I have been messing around with building websites. I had been introduced to the Internet in school, and knew my way around a computer very well for my age, but it wasn't until I was 11 that my family got the Internet at home. Immediately I fell in love with the idea of being able to publish a website, and having it be available to anyone in the world that also had an Internet connection. I began by building a few websites through Yahoo’s Geocites, which were dedicated to my Counter-Strike clan, and knew right away that I needed to take a more proactive approach if I was to build the kinds of websites that inspired me in the first place. I purchased a book called How to do everything with HTML and began building web sites the legitimate way. I built with tables for a year or so before I discovered that CSS was the more professional way to design. Sure enough, after a few months of learning CSS, I needed to satisfy my desire to continue learning, and jumped head first into PHP. Learning PHP, along with MySQL, allowed me to see just how powerful a website could be when you leverage the proper tools, and my passion for web development continued to grow. After building a few database driven sites, I wanted to keep pushing my abilities on the front end also, so I picked up a “Learn Macromedia Flash in 24 Hours” book and set to it. My passion for logic and design quickly made this one of my favorite programs. I could build advanced animations by using the timeline, but as I got my feet wet in Actionscript, I knew that I could develop some amazing things with this program too. As the year went on, my desire to become a professional web developer grew, and every moment I had free was devoted to reading books, tutorials, and case studies. It is my dream to one day be a consultant or a senior developer for a marketing firm or web development studio.
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