About

As a child, I longed to one day become a video game developer.  I would spend weeks of my Summer writing far reaching game descriptions down to the tiniest detail, having no idea how much linear algebra was involved. In middle school, we acquired our first family computer, a Macintosh Performa 638CD. I did some minor experimenting with Applescript, and built a few “tools” to manipulate AOL chatrooms (at 2400 baud).

Later I got into web development, and built my parents first photography website fotoverdi.com, (from archive.org, 1999-2000). I spent countless hours learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. By senior year, I had taken on a couple client projects, and created more table-based layouts than I care to mention. I also did a short internship at Periphonics/Nortel Networks in the Quality Assurance department, where I learned of things like Linux and Unix.

Calculus introduced me to graphing calculators, and I experimented a bit with TI-Basic, Assembly, and eventually C with the TIGCC project.  I coded an unfinished remake of the gameboy game TENNIS, that included 2d animation and artificial intelligence.

At Stony Brook University, I formed a web development and hosting company, now defunct, with a few friends. The work was only part-time, but it allowed me to get my hands wet with things like Perl, Flash, and PHP. I also did an internship at Cosmocom, where I got to play with VOIP software, and my first exposure to the .NET framework.

I decided to enroll in an accelerated Masters program, specializing in Information Assurance under the direction of my advisor, Rob Johnson. For six-months we did challenging work on a distributed system for worm defense in the SPLAT lab.

After college, I took a position as a Senior Web Developer for Lounge Lizard, where I worked on web applications, social networks, content management systems, search engine optimization, and e-commerce solutions. Day to day, I worked with things like Zend Framework, WordPress, and jQuery.

Eventually I returned to my Apple roots. When I’m not developing for the web, I now spend much of my time in Objective-C, building applications for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

I’m always up for an industry related chat – feel free to email me at: jared@[this_domain]