I started my career as a Graphic Designer for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), in 1986. I was right out of NH Community Collage/Manchester, but had been writing code and playing with computers for about 5 years. At DEC I was the first online graphic designer they hired. I created online illustrations for products like VAX/VMS, X-Windows, and many layered products and languages. This was before HTML and the Internet, when “online documentation” was delivered via CD-ROM.
In the 90’s I started creating interactive and database-driven websites with MS Frontpage and MS Access. The web technologies were primitive, but with a little imagination I created some pretty innovative stuff.
After Compaq Computers bought out DEC, I joined the web design and development team for Compaq’s customer support site. Our team won many awards, driving home the importance of fast, efficient, user friendly web design.
Around the time of the Hewlett Packard merger in 2002 I had mastered a high degree of MS SQL Database expertise. Many of my peers saw me as “the database expert”. I had the opportunity to work on many large scale databases, develop nightly jobs that processed tons of data, and design systems that provided the fastest possible response time. Designing data-rich applications to distribute, search and present information on the web became a passion.
I’m still passionate about databases and user-friendly web design. Check out my side project TrailsNH.com. My custom robots continuously gather hiking information from the web, determine it’s location, and store it in a database. The UI assembles everything the hiker should know about their destination into one simple web page.
I started working for myself in 2006 when I was one of the 15,000 people laid off in one wave at HP. Working for yourself is super interesting, projects are diverse and wide ranging, and lots of new things to learn. The flexible schedule is a nice plus but I don’t take advantage of it often enough.
Thanks for checking out my background. Here’s what I’ve built recently.