Professional Career
TL;DR version
I got into digital page layout in the high school paper. That interest led to tinkering with web design in the mid-1990’s. I was able to turn pro in the late 1990’s and did UI design and front-end development for web-based enterprise software in the Bay Area for 5 years. During that time I also started this site and helped b2 become WordPress. I then moved to Denver, CO and set off on my own. I created and sold my own web-based software, co-founded a feed reading start-up, and eventually started a web development agency called Crowd Favorite. After running Crowd Favorite for 7 years and growing it to 17 employees, I sold the business in 2014. I remained with the company until 2015 when I again became an independent developer. I passed away in September 2015.
Ok, that was a bit terse – tell me a story
The first computer experience I remember is my father bringing an original Macintosh home in 1984. I tinkered around a bit as a kid. I made digital pictures in MacPaint, played a few games, wrote papers for school, printed cards… stuff like that. I never did any programming, but I got comfortable using a computer.
In high school I got pretty involved in the school newspaper as the sports editor and layout editor. I especially enjoyed the design and layout work and I was pretty good at it. We used Macs with Aldus PageMaker for layout. We could work on any of 4 or 5 machines we had in a lab, but only one of them had the oh-so desirable giant 19″ black and white CRT external display. We did the actual printing of the paper in-house (we had a screen printing machine with plates, etc.).
Fast-forward a few years and I am in college at Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley. After spending two years working half-heartedly on a psychology degree I ran low on funds and started working full time at a nearby company that did direct mail. I was able to get in the door thanks to a connection I had who was running the Production department – the side of the business that ran the giant high-speed Kodak printers, stuffed envelopes, and ensured that the mail was properly sorted.
After about a year of working there, primarily running the printers, I sprained my ankle playing basketball and was on crutches for a while. The owners of the company knew I had some computer experience so they transferred me into the Data Processing (DP) department. The department head was a fellow in his mid forties. There were two full-time programmers in their mid-twenties who were pretty sharp, and three or four CS students who worked part time.
The DP department was responsible for taking a giant set of addresses and culling it down to the desired number of mail pieces to be sent, based on some set of parameters. We’d also put the addresses in a pre-sorted order to get discounts from the post office. The raw address data was stored on tapes and there were a number of in-house C programs that we could utilize, as well as some we’d purchased, to make our selections into the giant data sets. The overall job was a simple UNIX shell script that took the original data set, passed it from program to program with various flags and parameters set, and generated an output dataset that could be fed into the printers in the Production department.
It was very logical and straightforward and I was up and running in about 2 weeks. Around that time, there was some personnel turnover and I got the chance to stay in the Data Processing department permanently.
The DP department was not well respected in the organization, largely due to its manager. He was not well organized and did not manage people effectively. Jobs were consistently late coming out of DP and were not always delivered in a way that set Production up for success. Both Production and Sales were frustrated with DP. Sales because DP’s missed deadlines caused friction with clients, and Production because it would fall on them to try to meet the original deadline anyway after DP missed delivering to Production on time.
About 2 months after I had permanently joined the DP department the company brought in a newly minted Cornell MBA to help grow the business. She was very sharp and we clicked well immediately. She asked for my candid opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of the business from my perspective (Production and DP) and I pulled no punches in sharing my opinions. At one point, while I was complaining to her about something the DP manager had/hadn’t done that had caused some preventable problem, she asked me, “Could you do a better job?” And like only a know-nothing 20 year old can, I immediately and confidently replied, “Sure I can.” A few short weeks later I was the interim DP manager.
I had no management experience, but I had been doing the work in the trenches and I knew what was and wasn’t reasonable to expect. I also knew what was important downstream to the Production department and was thus able to work well with both groups. I had good support internally, largely from folks who were just happy to see the prior manager gone.
About 6 weeks in, I had things running pretty smoothly. I ended up running the department on my own for a little over six months before they brought in a full-time manager. I brought him up to speed and we worked well together; him in charge with me as his trusted lieutenant.
While all of this was going on during the day, at night I had started tinkering with designing and create web pages. I got a little web space that I could FTP files to, put down my $35 for the kingdesign.net domain, and set up my very own little web shop. I also created a Mac tips and tricks site called The Undiscovered Mac which was my only portfolio piece. Sure enough, I got a few nibbles and did a few more nights and weekends projects and eventually had a portfolio of 5 or 6 sites.
