As a child, I longed to one day become a video game developer. I would spend weeks of my Summer writing far reaching game descriptions down to the tiniest detail, having no idea how much linear algebra was involved. In middle school, my parents purchased our first family computer, a Macintosh Performa 638CD. I did some minor experimenting with Applescript, and built one or two “tools” to manipulate America Online at 2400 baud.
Then I got into web development. I built my parents first photography website fotoverdi.com, (from archive.org, 1999-2000) as a freshman, and got to know HTML and the worst of JavaScript. By senior year, I had taken on a couple client projects, and created more table-based layouts than I care to mention. I also did a short internship at Periphonics/Nortel Networks in the Quality Assurance department, where I learned of things like Linux and Unix.
Calculus introduced me to graphing calculators, and I experimented a bit with TI-Basic, Assembly, and eventually C with the TIGCC project. I coded an unfinished remake of the gameboy game TENNIS, that included 2d animation and artificial intelligence.
At Stony Brook University, I formed a web development and hosting company, now defunct, with a few friends called BS0. The work was only part-time, but it allowed me to do some serious web development. I got my hands wet with Perl and Flash, and went on to develop an e-commerce store using PHP. I also did an internship at Cosmocom, where I got to play with a lot of fun VOIP software, and some exposure to the .NET framework.
I decided to enroll in an accelerated Masters program, specializing in Information Assurance under the direction of my advisor, Rob Johnson. For six-months we did challenging work on a distributed system for worm defense in the SPLAT lab.
After college, I took my current position as a Senior Web Developer for Lounge Lizard. These days I work on web applications, social networks, content management systems, search engine marketing, and e-commerce solutions. Day to day, you’ll find me working with things like CakePHP, ZenCart, WordPress, Joomla, and jQuery.
I’m always up for an industry related chat – reach me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin
You can also email me at: jared@[this_domain]