Twenty years of building the web

My first paid web work was freelance, back in 1999. School made it official: while studying Computer Information Systems I taught the CSS section of the web design program and wrote 50+ desktop applications, including one downloaded over 5,000 times. The full-time career started in 2006 at Transformyx in Baton Rouge, hand-slicing hundreds of PSDs into cross-browser HTML and CSS and helping run a CMS that served 500+ clients. When your markup has to survive IE6 and your changes go live for five hundred businesses at once, you learn to be careful early.

The agency years came next at FUSE: NAPA Auto Parts, the Orange Bowl, Marucci Sports. Campaign work runs on hard deadlines and art direction that has to land exactly as drawn. That stretch of Louisiana agency work is where the 2008 Gold ADDY for Best of Show happened.

In 2013 Packt published jQuery 2.0 Animation Techniques, the book I wrote with Dan Wellman back when jQuery was web animation. The decade that followed was product work at Envoc and then Trendsic: shipping application UI day in and day out, Vue when it was new, early JAMstack builds.

Now the senior years, at Universe, where I've been Web Lead since 2022: owning performance, large-scale SEO, and accessibility while managing six developers. Along the way I led a Figma design system that covers 150+ commercial sites.

Somewhere in there I traded Baton Rouge for Buffalo Grove, and the freelance work I take on now is for Chicago companies and remote teams. Working with me is measured, documented, and allergic to black boxes. If I build it, you can read it, run it, and own it.