Profiles

Computer Systems, retro tech, video games, hiking, cycling and parenting.

It all started when I left my job and moved to Portland. I didn’t have any work and was being the Stay At Home Dad to my toddler son.

I had lots of contacts from a previous job and I reached out to see if they had any work for me. Pretty quickly I was doing minor website updates (in HTML!), updating templates for bulk email newsletters and whatever fell in my lap.

People really wanted website designers and developers, and I tried to do that, but I’ll be honest that neither Project Management nor Coding were my strong suits.

My first WordPress specific work was for designers/developers who would hand me their design art assets and a theme and I would slice, dice and code until they matched. I called it website construction instead of design. I had to look it up, but I remember when Mingus came out and that was 2007.

Then one of them needed me to check out what was going on with their client’s WordPress website. I did have experience with SQL and servers, so I took a deep dive into the WordPress back end and learned how to trouble shoot and optimize.

I very quickly became the go-to database optimization and hack recovery person for all my previous coworkers who were now mostly freelance since the closure of the company we all worked for. I also did some work on Drupal and Joomla and even still have a Joomla client.

I got a contract maintaining a virtual server running multiple WordPress sites and routinely setting up and taking them down for various campaigns. That lasted over a decade. More WordPress work kept rolling in.

Eventually, I pretty much abandoned the site construction and just moved into backups, maintenance, security and hack recovery.