About

My name is Luke and I've been working with web technologies since I was in high school in 1996. CSS was just emerging. Every site layout was built using tables, or just center aligned down a never-ending page of scrolling marquees and the occasional dancing baby gif. Chat rooms were just html pages that were updated with a CGI form. It was an exciting time. Looking back at the evolution of the web since that time is pretty amazing.

I took a class in high school called "Global Networking" where we mostly just learned HTML. I had played around with HTML before that, but I really started getting hooked after that class. I pitched the idea to the school newspaper to start an online version, which I did in frames! I was so proud of what I created, and that was the beginning of what turned into a career.

It wasn't long until I started wondering about dynamic content and how that worked. MySQL was brand new and I'd never even heard of it. A lot of websites I frequented were using CGI scripts with flat files as a database, so I started there. I'm pretty sure I used a Perl app called NewsPro. I probably found it on HotScripts! I was a huge pro-wrestling fan at the time and I decided to build a wrestling news publication online. It even had a message board which was probably UltimateBB at the beginning. I can't believe I remember some of this stuff! A few years later I had moved to a LAMP stack, which I relied on for over 10 years.

My first job in the web development industry was at my local newspaper. They had a lead web developer, but they needed help with things like image processing and data entry. I started out by batch processing images of cars in Photoshop to upload to a local "auto finder" type of website where local dealerships would pay to list their cars online. Not long after that the lead developer left for bigger things and I became the main web guy. It was a dream job at the time. I mostly made websites for local businesses using our old friend Dreamweaver. We had a whole department called Interactive Media. Our Director/Sales person would sell websites just like an ad rep would sell print ads and I would build them. I also wrote a print job management system in PHP that was used internally to track all our publications. I ended up becoming the Director of the department, but management wasn't my thing. My passion is computer engineering and writing code.

I left the newspaper to start a hosting and development business in 2006. It was the scariest thing I'd ever done and there were many bumps in the road along the way. The business of hosting websites really honed my linux skills. I learned a lot more about automation, caching, reverse proxies, dns, mail servers, cloud engineering, a whole lot of Bash and more. But the recession in 2008 hit us really hard. I went back to work in 2009 while continuing to operate the business, which I still operate today.

In 2009 I started working as a IT specialist at our local community college. I was able to do a lot of different types of IT work in that job which I really enjoyed. I was doing support on-site, troubleshooting hardware and software issues, writing small line of business applications in ASP, managing databases, and learning management systems. It wasn't long after I started that I found myself with new opportunities. I moved into more of a focused application development role where I mostly wrote console apps for ETL processes and web applications to fill gaps where our legacy ERP fell short. At this point most of our stuff was in C#. Years later yet another opportunity presented itself and I moved into the database administrator position. I was really fortunate to have worked across the full gamut of IT in my time with the college and it no doubt made me a better analyst, dba, and programmer. But as with all good things, I felt for reasons both personal and professional it was time to move on from higher education after 15 years and I took a systems analyst job in local government.

I had never really thought much about what a Systems Analyst does before I became one. It's really sort of a jack of all trades within the scope of business processes. I'm a programmer and a database administrator as well as a system administrator. Another way I think of it is alternating between a full stack developer and a server administrator. It was a perfect landing spot for me since the bulk of my experience is in programming and database and web server administration.

When I'm not programming at work, I'm programming at home. I love exploring new languages and technologies. My favorite language is Go and cloud engineering and automation really interest me currently. I would like to take a stab at learning Rust when I have some time.