Joe Barrett - Dec. 11, 2016, 9:14 p.m.
I've been talking for years about putting some kind of blog together for myself. A place to share some development projects I've worked on, ideas I come up with, or just other things I think are worth it. Well, I'm finally doing it.
I guess I should start by introducing myself...
I'm Joe Barrett, a (currently) 29-year-old web development and gaming hobbyist. I enjoy building websites, playing FPS games, football, cars, music, movies, and vaping. I know, I know... vaping—but it has helped me to be cigarette free for over two years now. I graduated from The Chubb Institute in June of 2007, where I took the Graphic Design & Animation course. Before school, I wanted to be a video game designer. Later, that changed to wanting to take a graphic design career route.
After graduation, I went on a few interviews for a lot of different types of jobs related to design of some sort. In October of 2007, I started working at Advantage Business Media (ABM as I might reference it in future posts). Believe it or not, after 9 years and a few different positions I'm still there. I started as an Ad Production Coordinator. It was a straightforward "copy/paste into a template" gig to place advertisements into our email newsletters. The editorial content part of that was placed into the templates by a separate department. After a while those two teams merged together, which brought me to my next position of Web Production Specialist. Next on the list was Web Production Supervisor. I started learning more about HTML and CSS as they related to coding an email. (I don't miss all those tables and weird CSS at all.)
Around that time is when I started getting more interested into the development side of things. It started with my Droid X. Rooting, flashing, bricking, and bringing my phones back to life to do it all over again. One of the dudes on the development team took notice, and became what you might call a mentor to me. Once talks of an email redesign and a new deployment process started, he gave me a shot at helping through the redesign and implementation of the project. That was my first dip into PHP and TWIG. Not long after that, I moved over to the development team as a Junior Front End Developer.
After two years of learning more and earning my keep, I was promoted to Front End Developer. Throughout the time in between, I've learned and worked with an incredible amount of different frameworks, languages, and tools to get the job done.
I will continue to post here as much as I can, and I hope to see you all back for more.