It was 1997, and I was working on my MFA Thesis at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles. A friend got a job making video games so he had to switch to PC and wanted to sell a Powermac cheap. I jumped on the opportunity and spent my final months in grad school also learning how to use a computer to do professional design work. I had the basics from a multimedia class, but dove deeper into Photoshop, Illustrator, Director and Flash.

This was the dot com boom and so I went straight from school to America Online. They had offices in the old IRS Records building dedicated to generating content for both America Online’s proprietary browser and their html presence. I was a designer, using photoshop and illustrator to layout pages and then cutting up these pages into parts for the programmers to assemble into pages. Sometimes I was also able to use Shockwave and Flash for animations and more advanced interactivy.

During those 2 years I also made it a point to learn all i could about how to build the webpages, picking up html and basic understanding about web servers. I also learned about working for large companies. Something was always happening at the corporate level that was causing restructuring. Well eventually I was a casualty of one of those company wide meetings. I also learned about working for large companies. Something was always happening at the corporate level that was causing restructuring. Well eventually I was a casualty of one of those company wide meetings.

At some point during my time at AOL I got a side job with Whisky A Go Go, building them a site with HTML and Flash. It had an upcoming events calendar, ticket purchasing, and a historical archive of old pictures and articles from past shows. I ended up staying around as Webmaster for a couple of years to update and build out the site.

After AOL, my next full time position was with iXL an International Interactive Agency. My time there was spent either designing pages and processing graphics for HTML or building complex Flash ui’s and animations. A good chunk of my time there spent on either a HTML site for Mountain Dew or a Flash site Franklin Covey but I also worked on a number of promotional Flash sites for movies like The Haunting. iXL unfortunately was a textbook dot com bubble company, and when they burst they just shut down their LA offices.

I spent most of my time as Webmaster at 2 different companies, URB Magazine (2001-2005) and Universal Audio (2005-2015) where I designed, developed and updated each company’s website. Since 2016 I have been working at Launch Brigade as a Senior Developer, working on a mix of React apps we build in the AWS ecosystem and WordPress sites.