About

I love brass tacks and the nitty gritty. Ideas are great. Executing is better. Solving problems and building cool stuff is what I do.

Lead Web Developer At…

Gesture. We make mobile bidding, auction software and other fundraising technology to help nonprofits raise more money.

Code Featured In…

Hacker News | Awwwards | Webmonkey | JavaScript Weekly | HTML5 Weekly | Codrops | The JavaScript Show | Unheap | The Next Web | Impressive Webs | Think Vitamin | sfist | jquer.in | The Verge | The Treehouse Show | Active Tuts+ | DailyJS | Web Resources Depot | Codehum | instantShift | Web Resources Depot | Award-Winning Websites

I’ve spoken at…

Techweek Chicago | Prototype Camp | CHIHTML5

Keep up with me on…

Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn | Github

I also keep track of the best Chicago tech and startup events at…

ChicagoTechEvents.com

spacer Before I became a web developer, I was an artist, drawing comics books, doing storyboards and illustrating ads. It wasn’t long before I picked up Flash, at first building simple animations, and then rich interactive web content.

When Steve Jobs announced that Flash would never be on iOS, I changed my focus. I briefly gave app development a try, publishing a couple cross-platform mobile apps with the Corona SDK. One of them, Match The Letter, has over 10,000 installs, was featured as a new and notable app on the iTunes Store and has a 4.5 star rating.

I quickly decided that the world of HTML, CSS and JavaScript was for me. In addition to digital work for brands like Motorola, Taco Bell, KFC, Sharpie, got milk? and El Jimador, I began developing in the open, publishing open source projects as often as I could. My first big hit was Scrollorama, a jQuery plugin for supercool scroll animation. On the day it was released, it hit #1 on Hacker News and went on to be featured in places like JavaScript Weekly, The JavaScript Show and HTML5 Weekly. The first project I created with it was the web presentation deck “What The Heck Is Responsive Web Design?” which is now a top Google search result on the subject.

I have since gone on to release many more open source projects like Scrollorama, BigVideo.js and Responsivator. It is thrilling to see developers all over the world use my code in their projects, whether it is for doing high profile client work for Target or CSS Awards Site of the Day, redesigning their agency website or for getting married. Sometimes, they even win awwwards, get shortlisted by FWA or are featured as a site of the day.

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