About
For some reason, tech geeks love talking about their first computer, so in the spirit of geekness my first was an IBM 80386-33 Clone which I used to access BBSes and CompuServe on a 2400 baud modem. I lived in Elmhurst, Queens until I was 6 and got that computer shortly after my parents attained the immigrant dream of home ownership in the NJ suburbs. After AOL was invented, I started building websites for bands and other various local townsfolk. Unfortunately said townsfolk were not involved in the dot-com boom, so instead of working for worthless stock options at pets.com or valueamerica.com I attended “yet another liberal arts-based state school with a great education-to-price ratio, small class sizes, manicured shrubbery, and strange steam rising from vents in the ground.”
It was during college that I learned I could work four jobs at once: monitoring a computer lab, working retail at the mall, doing data entry, and interning for Dow Jones, Inc. Fortunately, I also started to figure out that you don’t have to stay at a job if its not really what you enjoy. I left the mall and data entry jobs and worked on some ASP VBScript and Microsoft SQL Server web applications for The Project Management Office at Dow Jones.
Being paid to do something you’ve done for free as a hobby most of your life seemed too good to be true to someone fresh out of college. As a result, I was very eager to please and was constantly learning more efficient ways to do my work. After graduating with my BS in Computer Science, I took a job as a full-time contractor for Mercedes-Benz working on HTML/CSS, Javascript, ASP and Access. They upgraded to C# ASP.NET and SQL Server shortly after I started, but it was during this time that I experienced the crushing Dilbert-like effects of corporate culture which I use as anecdotes throughout this here ball+log (blog).
I picked up Ruby on Rails during my spare time in order to continue learning and updating my craft, but like the folding clothes job at the mall, it was time to move on. I got a gig at a small web development shop in NYC and it was here that I learned I could do the work of four under motivated corporate employees. I thoroughly enjoyed the productivity and impact you can make at a small company. Instead of building internal applications that employees were reluctantly forced to use, I built public-facing sites that represented entire organizations.
Unfortunately, one of the partners left and all the full timers were laid off. After spending some time freelancing, a few amazingly talented people and I decided to get serious and start our own company, Simande LLC. Of course, there has to be a blog about it chock full of buzzwords like “Web 2.0,” “tech startup,” “entrepreneurship,” and “bacon.” So I guess the point of this blog is to record my thoughts and to track the progress of our little web studio startup.
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” - Albert Einstein
