1995: As a science fiction fan, I built a site containing relevant links and reviews of some of my favorite books. It never generated much traffic, but it did provide the opportunity to exchange correspondence with some SF authors.

1996: Employed by a used machinery brokerage company, my job was running both marketing and IT. My first commercial web site was the second in its industry. There was no budget for a web hosting package that included a database, and internal database ran on a network for dumb terminals. So I laid out template pages and wrote a Word macro that ran against our text catalog to create a paginated site divided alphabetically with categorized anchors at the top of each page. Then I found a PERL script that would run searches against the doc root and we had a searchable site. The macro also included meta tags for each page. That site continued to come up within the top 10 results for keyword searches for seven years (when it was temporarily retired).

1997: Using frames, I created a portal for the converting industry. The concept was a little ahead of its time for the target audience, but it worked great. Began writing computer game reviews for an e-zine, where I learned to write HTML that could be read by other humans and editors.

1998: Began writing for a spin-off of the first e-zine I wrote for, after first building the web site for all of us authors to post to. Started a side-business in IT.

1999: Went into IT full time as a consultant. Designed and delivered my first database-driven site in ASP for a spin-off of my former employer. My former employer soon became my third client. Did a face-lift on the site of a major non-profit organization (referred to me by the North Shore Computer Society). Later that year, two start-ups gave me my first experience working as part of a team of developers for their first web sites. One lasted all the way to 2002.

2000: Began contracting to a consulting company to do HTML and JavaScript development for a web-based application. Taught myself JSP over a weekend to extend the contract to the next phase. Also spent a lot of time with the architect and client as the requirements were being written just barely ahead of the development work. Become an employee to the company and became the lead for front-end development and integration. On the next project, played a major role in developing the ASP front-end to the first totally paperless financial services account opening application.

2001: Taught myself Struts during my bench time. Built the client side integration for a financial services site to Equifax identity verification, then wrote a Struts-base application to analyze and report on the process.

2002: Built a complete B2B application on Struts as a side job. By default, all of the web developers were on my team. Wrote a JSP tag-library to generate cross-browser compatible JavaScript. Became the manager for a team of consultants in addition to my billable development work.

2003: Turned the PhotoShop files of Visual Designers into JSP and ASP for clients in pharmaceuticals, records management and international franchises. It became a game between the VDs and I how tight and complex of a design they could come up with that I could turn into JSP/ASP/HTML/JavaScript integrated into Vignette/Documentum/Plumtree. We all succeeded. Weblogic Portal 8.1 was released with a completely different architecture than 7.0. Upgraded two pharmaceutical Business Intelligence Dashboards.

2004: Became the internal WLP Look-n-Feel guru. Worked on multiple BI portals with the Visual Designers once again playing “stump the HTMLinator”. Success all around once again. BEA later incorporated many of these innovations into their product based on our success. Began R&D into custom UIs on SharePoint, leading to oversight of custom SharePoint development. Became part of the code-review board, and always required as a reviewer for any code rendered in a browser. On a side-project, built a real estate site PHP application framework.

2005: Using Struts Tiles and standard Struts, designed a “portal-lite” framework for the purpose of creating rapid, data-driven prototypes that could be run on a sales reps laptop by a sales rep. Then built a demo used by a client for evangelizing BI portals, used it as a baseline for an executive risk-management portal engagement, and published the approach to developer.com as my first paid submission. On a side-project, took a real estate PHP application and customized it to integrate MLS feeds.

2006: Company development policy became that all UI frameworks must be reviewed by me before release. On a side-project, ported a complete telemarketing application to PHP.

2007: Became the web-development technical consultant for all major projects to ensure deliverables were extensible and maintainable. Changed jobs to become a principal consultant/client architect for a major portal product company. Consulted to a major communications provider on porting their SharePoint application to a J2EE-based portal application. Consulted to a major financial services company on a portal to integrate sites and applications with similar clientele to a single point of entry.

2008: Continue as consultant to a major financial services company in the portal initiatives developing the more complex pieces of the User Interface while also contributing multiple articles in UI development to developer.com.