Introductions ... Who r u?

[chrisjacob]

Chris Jacob, 25, male, living in Boambee East. Working from home as a
freelance web developer (PHP, MySQL, jQuery). Most of my work comes
from M&C Saatchi Group (global advertising agency.... Optus,
Woolworths, Westfield, Qantas, IAG, etc). I completed a Batchelor of
Multimedia at SCU on the Coffs Campus. Recently became a dad, my son
Rivah is now 15 months - gosh time flys!

I'm very interested in Ruby on Rails. Also I've been looking into
node.js, server side js and web socket stuff lately. I think
JavaScript is going to be a very important skill to build up. HTML5 &
CSS3 demo's continue to blow my mind. Big fan of iOS / iPad /
iPhone... I'm a PC user, but falling in love with my new Mac more and
more every day.

I look forward to getting to meet more local dev's and designers.
Hopefully make some good business connections and friendships.

- Chris

[Matthew Davidson]

Matthew Davidson, male, although gender is becoming increasingly
irrelevant as I'm now pushing 40 years old. Played around with web
development back in the days when possession of a copy of Windows
Notepad, Netscape Navigator, and of course Trumpet Winsock, meant you
were a "webmaster". Became involved in an "intranet" (remember those?)
project in the company where I worked, and became briefly excited by
the potential of CSS, XML, etc. until I looked beyond the lovely
standards documents on w3.org and found that the Web was pretty
fundamentally broken, and Netscape was as much to blame as anybody
(much more so than Microsoft!).

Would have given up on IT there and then (apart from gaming), were it
not for the fact that I happened to be using Perl at the time (PHP was
a joke back then - many would say it still is), and one day while
avoiding work I happened to read the preamble of the GNU General
Public License (GPL) and thought "Wow! This is going to change the
world!" Of course it already had; I just hadn't noticed.

So while I gave up web development, I also gave up Windows for Debian
GNU/Linux and never looked back. Beyond a few gratis websites for non-
profits I didn't do any more web development until my wife & I moved
from Sydney to Sawtell in 2004. I had been playing around with PHP,
thinking it was much better than it looked in the old days; it was
still Wrong with a capital "W", but seductively quick and easy to work
with.

We'd been told that when moving to regional Australia, the locals
would resent you for taking one of "their" jobs (we've since seen
absolutely no evidence of that), so we decided to start a business and
went looking for things we could do that nobody else was doing. Most
of the web development shops around Coffs at the time seemed to be
teenage kids with a cracked copy of Dreamweaver and an 8-week TAFE
course under their belt, churning out static tables-based sites, so
that seemed the obvious area where we could provide a complimentary
service without treading on too many toes.

Although I'd been out of the "industry" for a while, I'd been
following developments (CSS was now usable) and there seemed to be
lots of things about to break through (like the Semantic Web - any day
now, I swear!) that I was confident people around here would rush to
embrace. Wrong. Coffs is still reeling from the future-shock wrought
by the fax machine. Most of the people here who can afford a website
don't know what one is, or worse think they know better than you
because they've read one of those dreadful articles in business
magazines that endlessly recycles the same "10 Top Tips" on what you
need from a website that were only partially true 10 years ago, and
are worse than useless now.

Had a few very lean years where we learned to:

* choose our clients carefully, and refer the others onto the
Dreamweaver kiddies
* specialise in one thing and do it well (Drupal rocks!)
* swallow our pride and live with the absurdity of moving from Sydney
to Sawtell only to end up making most of our money from clients in
Sydney

I still have hopes that we can do work that can contribute to the
local community, and think that a requirement for that is getting more
collaboration between local developers, so kudos to Chris for starting
this group.

[chrisjacob]

A note to all the "teenage kids with cracked a copy of Dreamweaver and
an 8 week TAFE course under their belt".

1. You are very welcome to be a part of this group.

2. You should probably get in touch with Mathew if looking for some
referral work :-P

3. Dreamweaver... each to their own, but may I suggest trying out some
other IDE's, you'll thank me for it - promiss.

[Ruben]

Ruben Hillier, 41, male, living in Sawtell. 'Working' for SCU - IT
Crowd, 'try switching it off and on again' and myself see -
communitysites.com.au. First website was in Windows 3.14 for
workgroups using notepad, it was really cruddy. I moved onto the heady
heights of MS Frontpage and later Homesite/Dreamweaver also cruddy.
Lots of experience building networked systems of various flavours:
Windows, Mac's and Linux. Worked for Webcentral for a few years and
did a lot of Microsoft product beta testing and tech support.
Developed a CMS in ASP and that pushed me over the edge. Now I tinker
around with Drupal, Linux, homebrew beer and PHP. In that order. I
generally avoid more than three clients in a year because I prefer to
hang out with my varmititious kids (age 15 and 8).

If anyone'd like to meet - I'll be at Urban coffee shop on Mondays and
Thursdays 6.40am after a 6am swim at the Jetty... or catch me on
microblog.ourcoffs.org.au/tregeagle

cheers,
Ruben

[Matthew Davidson]

Good point, Chris; I can be a tad callously flippant at times.

Nothing at all wrong with doing a TAFE course (as far as I know -
Ruben may correct me there), provided you don't stop learning once
you're done.

[cdbragg]

cdbragg

You'll find me swimming with Ruben at the Jetty on Mondays and
Thursdays. Part time developer of Joomla based websites... wishing I
was better at designing templates. Or in fact, just better generally.

In my real job, I give out free computers.

[chrisjacob]

@Ruban, I would love to get the word out to SCU, CHEC, TAFE... I'm
thinking of dropping by the campus and putting up some A4 printouts on
the notice boards outside the labs. How would I got about getting an
email sent out to the Staff/Students in Tech/Design courses?

I think students could really benefit from this group... and us people
in the 'industry' can always learn a thing or two from the up-and-
comers.