An Introduction.

Sheldon Finlay — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:48:09 +0000

I built my first web page around 1995. I was a second-semester freshman at UMass Amherst and had just bought my first real computer: A Packard-Bell 100Mhz with 8MB of ram. I was the envy of many at the time, both in having Windows 95 and being able to navigate the servers at OIT. My first site was called MURG (named after a friend whom we affectionately called Grum), and was a collection of random, like so many web sites were around that time. I wish I still had a copy of it. The floppy I backed it up to seems to be corrupted and the WayBack Machine doesn’t go that far back. The site was hosted on the Umass OIT-UNIX server, which was my first experience with bash and shell work. Ah, these were the salad days when the web was green and new.

Now, I can trace my technical lineage back further to around the time I was in 5th or 6th grade. Like so many other geeks in my generation, my first computer introduction was a RadioShack TRS-80 and BASIC programming. I used to stay up all night typing in lines and hoping the program would run. It was a lesson in zen-like detachment, as I had no way to save my work. I later learned how to play music in basic and do graphics rendering. My prowess in BASIC earned my an achievement award in junior high. A little later I got a computer that ran MS-DOS. But even still I used to boot disk to program in BASIC.

Various hand-me-down computers came into my life between junior high and my first real computer in college. I learned a lot about breaking things and getting them to work again. I was a brute force computer user and learned the most from my mistakes.

Today, I am a web designer, web developer, and a server administrator. A sort of interdisciplinary web geek if you will. Along the way I have worked for an ISP, published in computer magazines, started several companies and consulted for numerous others. I am a devoted Mac user as of 2007, having switched after getting into Ruby and Ruby on Rails (more on that later). Although, I still spend a lot of time each day on Windows still. I am very passionate about Ruby as a programming language and Ruby on Rails for application development. I still feel like I am in the honeymoon phase with Ruby on Rails and continue to be amazed by it. Rails has changed the everything about the way I work and how I approach problems. It has been the biggest influence in my professional life apart from the web itself.

I am also a father to Erin and a husband to Amy. My wife runs KnittingHelp.com, one of the most popular knitting sites on the web. I serve as the designer, developer and host and she is the talent. When I am not on a computer I like to do strength training, eat good food, enjoy beer and wine, take photos, and just enjoy the world around me. I am also a sacred harp singer.

This blog is powered by WordPress. I had a hard time deciding between using a Ruby on Rails blog engine (Mephisto or Typo) or sticking with a PHP blog. Ultimately I choose WordPress, but I still have a pang of regret for not using a Rails blog engine.

On this blog I hope to share some of the things I am passionate about and give back a little of what I have learned over the last decade or so of work with the web.

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An Introduction.