Running underneath all of it
Every job on this timeline has a second one running alongside it. Design and web work started with a technical module in sixth grade, around 1998, and never stopped — straight through the battery plant, the organ shop and the heat-treat lab.
The largest of them ran from roughly 2010 to 2015: DatMavis.com, a personal project of more than 2,000 pages — every page designed in Photoshop and hand-coded in Dreamweaver, built as an explorable world rather than a list of posts.
Across those years: websites designed and built to customer specification for artists, musicians, authors and small businesses — brainstorming layouts to fit a client’s vision, then helping them build a strategy to grow their brand presence online through analytics, search advertising and social. Type and font design; layout, color and brand work. HTML, XHTML, CSS, Java and SQL. AutoCAD since roughly 2000 and Photoshop since roughly 2003, alongside Illustrator, Dreamweaver, CorelDRAW and Rhino. Audio and video production ran right beside it — Acid Pro since roughly 2003, Power Director since roughly 2008.
Two more things never stopped either: teaching complex systems to people who don’t share the training for them — hands-on, verbally, and in written work instructions — and formal data modeling: designing, laying out and implementing database management systems, user interface and semantic object models, entity-relationship diagrams.
