wolfsREIGN

Who Am I?

I am an Application Developer for Fox Interactive Media. I am currently in the Stations group, working on the MyFox family of sites (MyFox LA). On top of working for FIM, I also design and develop websites for myself and on as a freelance contractor.

I have been working in the industry professionally for the past four years, and have worked with great companies, and even greater people. Some of the companies that I've had the pleasure to work for include Schematic, Iventa, 101communications (now 1105media), and MySpace.

How It All Started

I have had an active interest in the internet since 1996 during my freshman year of high school. This interest led me to design a site for a “virtual enterprise” class that I was in my senior year. That year, I was informed that I was one of the most promising designers in the entire Kern County High School District involved in Virtual Enterprise. Within the year, I had progressed from extremely basic HTML, to more advanced techniques including javascript and flash.

Soon after graduating from High School in 2000, I enrolled at Bakersfield College. While there, I floundered for a year or so, until I was recruited by my friend to join him on the online staff for the college newspaper. The same semester that I joined the newspaper, I also enrolled in an ASP class to fuel my desire to begin developing dynamic websites. While on staff at the newspaper, I began toying with XHTML and CSS. At first I was like most people, only using CSS for text control, but eventually I began to learn of its potential for layout control.

The Turning Point

The turning point that firmly planted me into the world of Standards, was the most recent redesign of Spoono and a then recent article I stumbled upon by Doug Bowman, Throwing Tables Out the Window. I think the strongest influence was Doug’s article, especially his comments on how much bandwidth and money Microsoft could save if they switched from a table-based design and moved to a standards oriented design. From that article, I started reading other articles he had written. Because of that, I became aquainted with A List Apart. A List Apart, then introduced me to Eric Meyer, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, and Jeffrey Zeldman, Through a combination of all these influences, I became an advocate of semantic markup, the abstraction of design from content, and the intelligent use of javascript.

While in school, I began teaching the importance of standards-based markup to not only my peers, but to the teachers as well. I became involved in the development of a new intranet site that was controlled completely through CSS, and used semantic markup, and alternative stylesheets for accessibility.

Life After School

Even before I was technically finished with school, I was already doing work with MySpace, thanks to a code sample I had sent them of a new profile page that was semantic and made heavy use of CSS. While there I got to work on several projects, unfortunately few have seen the light of day. I was only there a short time however, and quickly moved on to better things.

After leaving MySpace, I went to work for 101communications and quickly became a valued member of the web team. I stayed with them for close to a year and worked on redesigns of the corporate website, THE Journal's website, and minor changes to several other properties' sites as well. On top of this, we also began work on a new intranet site, of which I was able to contribute three designs to for the style switcher.

Next came Iventa. I wasn't there long, so I don't have a lot to say. What I can say, is that while I was there, I had a great time, and we did a ton of work on their new "Dashboard" system. This is where I learned most of my .NET skills (of which I don't have many).

Schematic is probably one of the places that I miss working at the most. I had a blast working for them, worked with a great group of people, and got the chance to work on some of the best projects I've ever seen. First, look at their client list. It's amazing the companies they do work for. What's even more amazing is the work they do for these companies. I got to work on stuff for Target, FOX, The Weather Channel, ABC, ABC Family, and MLG Pro. There were a couple of long nights, but they always made up for it one way or another.

And this brings us to now. Fox Interactive Media. Another great place to work. I've been here almost a year, and I don't see myself going anywhere anytime soon.