iii Media

About Me

Delightful beginnings

My early engagement on web development started during my junior high school days at Quezon City Academy. That was when I became an associate for the school's I.T. group and got affiliated with Net Effect, the schools I.T. service provider. QCA is one of those few secondary schools in our place with a very high regard for Information Technology. I.T. is a top priority in the school's academic program.

Surrounded by people with the same keen interest on I.T., I started to slowly learn web design. That was the age of Microsoft FrontPage and the time when scrolling marquees are a big hit. You click a button and then you see that text sliding from left to right. And it fascinated you so bad. So bad that you got yourself a Geocities website and filled it up with animated GIFs and glowing images. I did.

Then it got a little more serious. I figured out that you can do some more fascinating stuff by typing in string of texts called tags. That was HTML. And so I enjoyed it and got obsessed with it. And the rest is history. Soon there came Dreamweaver, and Photoshop, and Flash, and several more. And everything just got even more amazing.

Coping up with standards

I went on with studying web design. I taught myself how to manually code HTML from scratch. And then I learned about CSS and embraced the beauty of separating content and design. I worked for Web Phil as a trainee on their Web Design Deparment. Where I have been strictly taught of usability and website optimization. And have been consistently lectured of Jakob Nielsen's ideologies. Flash websites were a taboo. Slow loading images were a no-no. And fancy eye candies just won't make it pass QA.

I focused on creating minimalistic, content-centered designs that deliver web contents in less than 150kb per page. And it was all good. As content, indeed, is king.

Taking it to the next level

All throughout college as I pursue my Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, I have delved deeply and seriously into all my programming courses. There was the unfriendly Turbo C, who didn't even bother highlighting my code. Then the uber friendly VB.NET, who almost didn't want me to write any code. And then the versatile Java. They were all nice and good but maybe, I was just born with the heart for the web, and so I chose a different path and tried it out with ASP.

Soon after college graduation, I immediately shifted to PHP. It was when I was hired as a PHP developer at GFX New Media that I've decided I'm going to tie the knot. CodeIgniter is the sweetest and the open source community is just so wonderful.

Currently, I'm working as a senior web developer at Pervasive Learning, a development firm specializing on e-learning, Flash, and game development and working along side with Green Jakobsen. At Pervasive, I have been enjoying my time writing AJAX-based apps built with JQuery and serving as a backend programmer for Flash development. Lately, I have also been exploring CMS development using WordPress.

It's definitely a very long way still through my web development career. But I'm surely having the time of my life.