About

Web Work

I started doing web work in 1999 while I was in in the INFOTEC program at Capilano College. At that time INFOTEC concentrated heavily on CD-Rom Authoring with Macromedia's Director software. Flash was just starting to happen and everyone was pretty excited about that (I soon got over it).

I graduated from INFOTEC in 2000, the year the first internet bubble burst. Just coming out of school, it was really hard to get work. I did some work for a local design firm creating html sites and I started a web site for a local community news paper.

I then started doing contract work for the Ottawa based NGO, the Canadian Public Health Association. I created a bunch of static html for them (example site). I also designed a couple of interfaces for online database applications that they were developing (example site).

The CPHA static html sites were large beasts with hundreds of content pages. They sites were bilingual, so each site had a discreet English and French side to it, with all of the pages cross-linked (imagine, large unwieldy beast x 2). I even did one site in English, French and in Inuktitut, (go here to see what a site in Inuktitut looks like).
I used Dreamweaver templates to wrangle these mountain of static html pages. This really sucked.

On the other hand, doing the UI design for the database applications was really fun.
I went on to do a project for the Learning and Instructional Development Centre at Simon Fraser University where I did the html interface for an existing Django database application. This had a very beautiful Flash front end but they needed an html version as well.

I created my first Drupal site for a client site using Drupal 4.6 (it is still online) and have never looked back. Since then I have created dozens of Drupal sites and I maintain most of them.
I have been a proud Drupal member for over 6 years.
In this time I have learned immensely from material on the drupal.org site. I have been active helping test modules and helping other members in the help forum.

Education

I have studied:

• social science and film at the University of Regina where I became friends with one of my personal heroes, Jean Oser.
• photography at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto.
• new media at the Applied Information Technology Program (INFOTEC) at Capilano College in North Vancouver.