What I do to pay the bills and finance my travels is primarily website development and consultations. I've worked for internet companies, done consultations for in-house computer equipment for businesses, worked rapid prototyping for small platform games, and finally took that step to do it on my own and start my own technology company. I've also been author to technical user manuals for the thousands of laymen who had to use the software; translating an engineer's mindset into only what the user cares to know is a tricky business.
The bulk of my work today is working with graphics artists converting their designs into real websites. I'll take their photoshop files and turn them into fully functional websites, wikis, online stores, blogs, and just about whatever else they want. I know how the graphics artists work, since I do the work myself from time to time, so I'm able to take their view and convert it to the engineering mindset required to properly get it to market. When I'm not doing that work for someone else, I'm doing everything for my own personal clients and my own projects from scratch.
My true passion is for traveling and seeing as much as I can in my lifetime. Almost every decision I've made in my life involves this passion. I chose software engineering over med-school because medicine was a bit too limiting on the work locations, and I focused on web technologies because I could be anywhere to work, not just a company's office. Blame it on my parents spoiling me with sight seeing at a young age if you want, but I'm hooked on going anywhere and everywhere whenever I can. Me being away for months at a time isn't unheard of, and I've accumulated a massive cache of pictures and stories that I'm trying to find a way to fully utilize.
I find myself with many irons softly glowing at any given time, and not the time to aptly indulge myself in the potential they yield. There's only so much time a single individual has, and I'm too inquisitive to not dig into each of them myself.
I have my hand in a lot of fields aside from my focus on websites and web technology. I find that most of my interests cross paths on a frequency beyond that which I expect. I'm an avid photographer seeded from my extensive traveling, and the optics, camera angles, sightlines, and such used for stills easily translate into the world of videography. The video aspect combined with my uncanny fascination with animation and cartoons works wonders as an editor for web-based, flash animations that my friends create. I have been known to even lend my voice to a few of their projects.
I have the utmost love for competitive sports, far beyond just a couple. I've always been very active and have frequently been involved in competitions since I was very young. This longing for athletic competition only grows greater due to the sedentary nature of my typical work; a couple irons involve this desire and are some of the most valued plans I have to date.
I'll give a little background on what I've done with this site as an example for my work. I'm often at the forefront of research when it comes to web technology, but I prefer to have a back seat to what's going on. I guess I should be a little more active, but I let those who have a passion for it work in my stead.
Before I go into detail, I'd like to mention that there is no flash being used on this site.
I wanted to create something very simple for my own site, but something that was completely unique as well. The end result was to have just a couple sections to explain who I am and what I do, then somehow to contact me. I'm a minimalist in my work, so I do small, clean markup. I went with html5 (nothing too fancy though) for the actual markup since it's fairly well supported and is the next thing rolling down the pipeline. For the graphics, I experimented with techniques I don't normally incorporate into my regular work since I do primarily corporate sites that require clean lines. Depending on your browser and how new it is, you might be seeing customized fonts as well. I decided to incorporate downloadable fonts via css with font-face; it's nice to play with new features, and this is as new as they come. To allow graceful degradation, I wrote a browser-detection system on the back-end to check if your browser supports downloadable fonts and override the default styles if it does. This lets me keep the look acceptable even if you run an older browser.
Depending on the project size, I'll either write my own javascript from scratch or incorporate a library. Both scriptaculous and jquery are popular and easy to work with; to get those drips going down the page I opted to use a library. I didn't feel like the effort would have been worth it to write my own animation system just for that, and I chose jquery only because it pollutes the global namespace of the dom less.