About
A little bit more about me and a little bit about this site.

Biography

Bill's PhotoI am a 43 year old guy lucky enough to have his hobby be his profession — I started programming way back as a teenager on the family's Apple II computer and haven't really stopped since.

I am continuously curious and interested in new technologies and usually have the latest books on the subjects that I'm interested in. I'm never a day without reading either a book or any of the countless blogs that I follow. As a result, I'm always current on the latest technical trends.

In addition to my love for technology, I also have a keen interest in business and marketing. Some of my heroes are Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin. I like to bring an entrepreneurial spirit and approach to all that I do. To some degree, this very site embodies those ideals — I am marketing myself as a product using outside-the-box entrepreneurial thinking.

So that I do not come across as one-dimensional, I should tell you that I am an absolute sports nut. In recent years, hockey has been my favorite sport which baffles people since I am a native Texan. However, football and basketball are very close seconds. I am a die-hard Texas Aggies fan since I am an alumni.

Lastly, and most importantly, I'm married to my beautiful wife and we share a home in Irving, Texas with our cat, Autumn — the Sweet Kitty. My wife and I love long vacations to Kauai and would like to find a way to someday live there. Until then, we're happy to enjoy a healthy life on the mainland.

Skills

I have sweet skills and this site must have a tag cloud and some AJAX to be considered Web 2.0, so take a look below. You can display it in two ways: 1) by experience level and 2) by interest level. If you aren't familiar with any of the terms, you can follow the links.

Colophon

This site is built with Ruby on Rails, though it is mostly a static site. Why go through the trouble of using Rails? Because I wanted to ensure that I could add dynamic elements when I felt they were necessary.

I would not consider myself a gifted designer, so I must give credit to a couple of sites which inspired me. First, the color scheme was inspired by Cork'd by Dan Cederholm. Second, the persuasion architecture was borrowed from 37signals' recent Highrise website.

Though I may have been inspired by others, the site's markup is my own — in some cases more semantic that the source that inspired me. Further, the CSS is my own as well, though I do use portions of the Yahoo YUI Library CSS Tools.

While this site is not a technological tour de force, there are a few elements of interest. For instance, the résumé print features are enhanced by Javascript which enables you to print either the condensed or expanded versions individually. Also, the Skills tag display uses Ajax if you have Javascript turned on. By using the Hijax approach, this adds a layer of progressive enhancement to the site. This is to say that if you turn Javascript off, you won't get these features, but your user experience will still be fine.