A little background

I got my start with HTML in the mid 90's, building guitar-themed websites in the back of my dad's ISP storefront. Satisfied with my progress, I took roughly 25 years off from web development to build a life as a musician in Montreal (and later Toronto).

When lockdown struck in the spring of 2020, my wife and I decamped to her childhood home on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. With little to do at the time aside from a weekly Zoom-based trivia night and endless rounds of the board game Wingspan , I checked in on the web-development world to see how things were going. I thought I might like to build my own pages instead of relying on some platform or another. First, I built a site for my music project, then another for my in-laws' bed and breakfast. After some ill-advised attempts at becoming a Wordpress person (using a blocks-based graphical page builder), I discovered that tinkering with the underlying code was much more "my kind of thing".

I decided at this point to learn some Javascript and CSS, and eventually found my way on to Scrimba's "Front End Career Path". Scrimba is a learning platform that enables the instructor to screencast and write code in a browser-based text editor, allowing the student to pause the lesson at any time and edit the code herself. I had a great time building some little apps and games; the real fun starting when we got into the React library and started creating more component-based, api-driven web apps pulling in external data (which triggered my "organization brain" in a pleasing way).

Now I build websites and apps for small businesses, friends and family, and just for fun. I use React, TailwindCSS and whichever JS framework I am enjoying at the moment (currently it's Remix). I enjoy it all quite a lot and would like to find full-time work in the space when the time is right.

- Graham, Spring '23