Work:

Currently I work in an amazing web development group at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

We deal in CMS’s (Content Management Systems) that focus mostly on clinical trials, but we also do some custom app development as well.  Our sites help facilitate a dialog amongst various study groups around the world, giving members the ability to update their own website, share documents, participate in wiki’s, share video, all in real time, all in a closed and secure web 2.0 environment.

My role in the group focuses primarily in the design implementation arena.  Our designer creates a mock up of how he envisions the site could be and then presents the mock up to the client. Once the client is okay with the “look and feel” of it, it is then handed to me to build and bring to life!

The construct that I build our sites off of is an open source project called “Plone”.  The Plone development community spans the globe and is continuously growing due to it’s robust feature set, it’s amazing developer support, and the fact that it’s open source (read: free) to anyone who wants to use it.  It’s primarily Python based and it runs on top of a Zope Content Management Framework.  My days are spent developing Plone’s CSS, as well as creating and tweaking it’s templates so that all of it looks swell and, more importantly, fits our clients needs.  During the rare down times, I try and help others in my group out, all the while trying to expand my skill set.

IT in general has been pretty good to me, I’ve been in some flavor of it for over a decade now!  The future is getting harder and harder to tell nowadays, but I’m pretty damn sure that whatever I end up doing with my life, I’m sure I’ll be in touch with a keyboard almost daily.