Jacob Morris

I am a driven and knowledgeable computer wizard (whether you’re partial to Gandalf or Dumbledor, the analogy remains the same).

I began my journey into technology as a young child; with multiple computers in our home, it wasn’t very long before I learned as much as a six-year-old could. From DOS to 10 I’ve learned how the operating system works and how it can be made to bend to my will.

With the introduction of programming in my early teenage years, it was only a matter of time before I started writing programs to do what I would have previously done manually or with batch processing in a terminal window. VB6…I think most of this generation of programmers started with VB6 or something like it. It was rudimentary but complex at the same time, but it did everything I could ever ask for at the time. My high school offered a C/C++ intro to programming class, I took it because 1) I thought it would be an easy A (It was) and 2) How could I pass it up? In that class we learned the C programming syntax, it took me a bit to adjust to brackets and hard variable typing, but once I had that out of the way, everything else fell right into place as it was simply a new language to learn. Shortly after high school, I started work on a private server for an MMO, I found a public source and began my journey into C# and the .NET framework, since then it has been .NET version after .NET version adding to my need for more challenging and more complex code. I started writing programs that were actually useful, granted most of them were to either exploit a game in some way, but useful nonetheless. It was at this point in my career I began to understand multithreading, but not necessarily thread-safety. I needed my code to do multiple things at once, it was a brave new world with static variables everywhere because how else is one thread supposed to communicate with another. Oh, how times have changed, but my love for the code has not.

At the same time as my C/C++ class, I began learning PHP–because that’s where every novice web developer starts, right? I already had a basic grasp of HTML at this point, so diving into PHP was fun and a great learning process. It not only grew my understanding of how the internet actually works but also my skills as a web designer. Once I started writing dynamic pages with PHP I had to learn how to make them look pretty. I learned how to write HTML/CSS and JavaScript and validate it with the W3C. I experimented with JavaScript for form validation and real-time data manipulation before client-side browser code was really mainstream, or at least before I knew it was. In my never-ending quest to learn more and be better, I began using jQuery and AJAX. The decent into modern web apps had begun and nothing would stop it.

Now I volunteer for my local church, developing and maintining our websites and managing all the ins and outs of our web presence.