intro to me

I’ve never had to write a resume for myself before, and I really would rather just write than spend the time hacking around in the resume templates on Word, so here goes. My technical history, in essay form…

I’m originally from Atlanta GA. Privately educated there and went on to get a degree in Recording and Production from Appalachian State University in North Carolina. The recording degree was kinda silly in hindsight, though the last two Railroad Earth records wouldn’t have gotten done without my building the studio, twice, from scratch. I have a pretty extensive background in all forms of recording and digital production, as well as being pretty familiar with the electronic engineering aspect of both analog and digital studio gear. I solder. I know how an LA-2 works, versus an 1176. I know the difference between a 12AX7 and a 12AY7, and can explain why 24 bits are better than 16. I spent a few years in the van with the Yamaha Live Sound book, which instilled an interest in electronic engineering, until it clicked in my head that building boutique recording gear and amps wasn’t really a growth industry.

About 2 years ago I got an iPhone. My story wouldn’t be complete without mentioning this detail. That’s when the possibilities of the software and internet sector and the emerging mobile market began to dawn on me. Now, there’s a growth industry. So anyway, once Apple opened up the phone to outside developers I dove in, bought a Mac and started teaching myself programming. I focused obsessively on iPhone programming for the first six months or so and during this period began to get up to speed on modern programming concepts. Around the turn of the year last year I began brainstorming a suite of products and services geared specifically toward the artist end of the music business, and even more specifically at my band. This is when I began poking around at web development, going through the various languages, toolkits, and frameworks available to the modern web developer. I’d begun making some connections in the software and tech startup sector and knew where to find answers to my questions by this point. I set up this blog on the advice of one of the tech blogs I read.

Thus began in earnest my self-education in web development. My curiosity outgrew the Google Blogger site in a few weeks and I moved over to a self-hosted Wordpress system. This was April or so, this year. Thus began my self-education in web hosting and CMS (content management system) installation, customization, and maintenance. Still working on my bigger vision I stumbled across both Drupal and Joomla – two popular CMSs – and realized that plenty of people had had the same idea that I’d had – that it shouldn’t be so difficult for the layman to achieve a web presence. All of these systems are written in PHP, which is an almost universally available web programming language, so thus began my education in coding PHP. The nice thing about all of these CMSs is that they’ve all been in wide use by many programmers for years now, and they are flexible and extensible by the nature of being open-source. Pretty much any customization that you can think of and certainly the most common ones have been done a million times by this point, so my lack of a CS degree doesn’t prohibit me, or anyone for that matter, from achieving detailed levels of customization in a matter of days rather than weeks. Not to mention, the best way for me to learn is to follow the paths that others have already created, so hacking at WordPress and Drupal has been a lot of fun.

In August I began a rebuild of my band’s site. I’m not a designer, and RRE doesn’t seem to have the financial resources available to hire one, but I did my best. All of the various features on the different pages are simple custom functions that I wrote to output different HTML depending on which page was requested. Our search traffic went up 3500% the day I switched the site, and our overall traffic is up 50% since then. WordPress is a great CMS for a relatively straightforward site, and it couldn’t be easier for a client to maintain the content. For more complex sites, the Drupal framework is about as good as it gets to me. The server-side installation is a piece of cake and the customization with whatever features the client wants is generally a fairly straightforward process.

=>What I lack disclaimer => is much experience with JavaScript, which is the client side programming language that achieves all those fancy visual effects on some of the sites out there. JavaScript is what makes things fly around the page when you mouse over them and what animates drop-down menus and all that. I know how to learn it, though, and there are JS frameworks out there to achieve many tasks, and I have a great JS book, but that is a gap in my skill set at this point. -> end disclaimer