I love video games, food and my girlfriend, Jenny. In the virtual world, I lead the Moogle Mafia which is a giant (hundreds of people-strong) guild of video game fanatics whose purpose is to train new players in the games we play in. I enjoy browser-based strategy games as well as online MMOs. (Yes, I play WoW, and lead my guild of 157 players.)

I love leading and I love having to use my brain. Strategy and optimization are my two biggest strengths. Hand-eye coordination and writing intelligibly by hand are my two biggest weaknesses. I despise exercise of any sort, with the possible exception of DDR which I do my best to convince myself is actually just a video game and the exercise part is just an unforeseen bug in the original programming (which they will eventually correct in the next patch).

My past programming experience was rather limited. While fluent in HTML, my PHP is entirely self-taught and all I know of MySQL was learned through a combination of trial and error and Google!

I am widely known for being the tallest, skinniest, public transportation user in Tempe. (Yes, I am car-less, relying on Tempe’s infamous busing system to get me where I need to go.) Weighing in at 150lbs and standing 6’6″ tall, I am easily spotted in any crowd by the bright green mushroom hat I wear everywhere I go. To date, there are actually only a tiny handful of people in the world who have ever seen me without it.

When given the opportunity, I will ramble endlessly about anything, as I seem to be doing at the moment. So… I… should probably… stop.

Over the past month there has been a lot of action around here. We’re closing up several smaller projects and getting a move on a few new, larger-scaled ones. I’ve been able to contribute to six different websites doing various design and development tasks. I’ve created WordPress and Magento templates, worked on WordPress and Magento administration and installation tasks, written custom PHP for a few websites and worked a lot with CSS and simple designs.

I’ve posted about Magento before and how great of a program it is. Well, I’ve also come to see the hard side of Magento now as well. The side that Brandon is always telling me about. Magento’s learning curve is very high, and it is very difficult to do some things that would seem easy. However, if you stick to default functionality, Magento will do wonderful things. For now, I think I’ll save my Magento talk for a different post.

I’ve been able to learn new things and fine-tune my skills. I’ve also been working on learning mod_rewrite. This Apache module is extremely useful for creating SEO friendly URLs and just making URLs look the way you want them to. You can turn http://www.example.com/index.php?state=arizona&city=mesa&id=12 into http://www.example.com/arizona/mesa/location/12/. Pretty slick! Expect a tutorial on this. However, it is quite confusing and frustrating to use. Just reading the intro from the Apache website gives that away.

I do a lot of CSS work around here. Anyone who works a lot with CSS knows how frustrating it can be when things don’t cascade the way you are expecting, especially when trying to be cross-browser compatible. IE6 has become my personal tormentor. If you haven’t read Chris’s post on phasing out IE6, you should take a look at that. And if you’re still running IE6, do us all a favor and upgrade to IE7 or get Firefox. The Latest versions of Safari and Opera are also very acceptable. There are many options. Let’s change that 25% IE6 user base to 0%.

Well, until the next installment, adieu.

Now, we always Facebook and MySpace (which I refuse to link to) search anyone we’re considering hiring. But for some reason, a proper Google search completely escaped my mind. Until now.

I’m just saying that we could’ve made his first day (nay, even just the *interview*) considerably more fun (for us) if we, say, dressed as Goombas or other Mario arch-nemeses.

It should be totally obvious by now that you need to be fully aware of your social networking identity, as your potential hires, clients, inamorata and life partners can, will and SHOULD do at the very least a cursory background check by making sure there’s nothing absolutely terrifying or bizarre about your personality before, well, getting into bed with you. Or, in this case, a useful source of mockery for the next three months.

I can most easily be described as a life long student. I have a B.S. in Criminal Justice Administration, a Master of Public Administration degree and was recently accepted to the ASU Doctoral program in Public Administration where I will be researching the government’s use of Internet surveillance technologies as a means of control and coercion in the citizenry.

My technical background is a varied one. My specialty is anything and everything open-source; primarily Linux. I hold certifications in UNIX system administration and have been to a number of technical training conferences from organizations such as USENIX, LISA, and SANS and have been trained in areas such as: system administration, linux OS security, networking, computer and network forensics, and web application security. I am also a GIAC Certified Computer Forensic Analyst and enjoy computer forensics as a study and practice.

I have been developing under the LAMP stack for about 4-5 years now and have experience in everything from AJAX, object oriented PHP, and MySQL database design to the Google Maps API, Drupal, CodeIgniter, and more recently, Magento.

In my free time, I enjoy archery, shooting, competitive badminton, hiking, and photography. My wife and I are also expecting our first child in early November; we are very excited about that.

If I show up on the blog it will be either liquor fueled angry polemics that will undoubtedly be deleted by Chris once he finds them, or something about ECMA-262-3, or maybe tributes to John Singleton—I read about him a lot in GoF, Alur and Fowler.

I might also write about dive day, where we travel up main street looking for shady restaurants to have lunch in a form of adventure dining that almost never ends up with someone sick or us becoming unwitting accomplices to a “jacking”.

Finally, I’m also a fan of beards, including Doug Crockford’s beard, but especially the maestro—Ben Bernanke—and his beard.

This fall, I will be starting my senior year at Arizona State University. I’m studying Computer Science with a concentration in software engineering. My passions are definitely in the web development arena. I aspire to become a skilled developer, and to produce quality work that I get payed well for. I have also been accepted to the Integrated Masters Program, and will simultaneously start grad school throughout my senior year.

In the past I have developed mainly with XHTML, CSS, and PHP, and have done many projects over the past few years. Recently, I have been working with CampusSpots.com to develop their website and prepare it for expanding across the country. Other personal projects include Finding Restaurants and Regular Heroes (my band).

Though web development is fun, I often find my attentions divided to my other interests. I love performing. I love to participate in musical theater, ballroom dance, choirs, and other performing. Right now I play keyboard and sing backup for Regular Heroes. I also enjoy writing piano and choir music, lyrics, poetry, and fictional stories. Other interests include making funny faces, picking up loose change, religion, and dark chocolate.

I live in Mesa, AZ, with my lovely wife Penny, and we don’t have any kids yet.

At Synapse Studios, we like to hire people who have existing side projects or personal web sites going. It represents a certain drive and passion for the technology and personifies the obsessive zeal we’re looking for in our team. Jeremy recently started Finding Restaurants, a kind of restaurant directory-directory. In talking yesterday, I suggested he consider making it a bit of a restaurant review site aggregator, ala MetaCritic. I’ll talk a bit more about our discussion that followed in another post. In the meantime, look for a proper introduction by Jeremy to come real soon.

As a developer, my primary contributions to this blog will be about enterprise patterns and reuse ability as we implement them in client projects and particularly in the Canopy Framework. One of my particular strengths is the wide variety of experience I have beyond the realm of PHP-based web development. In a previous life as a desktop application developer I worked primarily with C# and so I have experience with the things the .NET library does well and those which PHP does better. Based on this experience, I’ll be working with the team this summer to incorporate some exciting automation and reusability enhancements into the framework. Stay tuned, as the coming months promise to be exciting times for the web’s next best application platform. [That's Canopy, we think]

We look forward to adding Brandon’s expertise to our group and are excited for his input on our various projects. We currently have him working on a few of our e-commerce client websites that we will be migrating from various platforms onto the Magento e-commerce solution.

On behalf of everyone at Synapse Studios, welcome Brandon!

My primary contributions to the blog will likely come in the form of advice about how we have overcome the problems, obstacles and hurdles that face most start-ups. We have made our share of mistakes along the way but all in all, we continue moving forward each year. This one is working on being the best yet.