After graduating from Purchase College with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in 1996, my first interaction with the Internet involved a trip to the Grand Army Plaza public library. I was looking for ideas on how to make a living. After many hours of surfing the web for career ideas, I realized website building was something I could do.
Jake’s Bodega, my first website, highlighted my artwork and used the big blue house as the metaphor for the site structure. Using this website, I got my first job as an HTML coder and spent the next several years working for several ‘Dot Com’ companies.
After hand-coding HTML for a half a dozen large scale websites, I knew there had to be a better way to build them. So I built my first JavaScript-based content management system (CMS) for my personal resume website.
In 2000, I started working with Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and built a content management system in ColdFusion for them. My approach was this: I compared the construction of a home to software development. And in the building of a home or a website, occasionally do it right, you need to tear it down and start over, which is exactly what I set out to do with the MSKCC website.
In 2001 the reconstruction continued. It required rebuilding the content management system using ASP/Jscript and resolving dozens of issues as well as modularizing every possible component of the application. I ensured this application would scale to handle MSKCC’s growing needs on the world-wide web. The CMS I built for MSKCC is called the Inettool and is still being used by MSKCC for their internal and external websites.
In 2010, a decade after building the Inettool, I started the process of moving MSKCC.org to Drupal, an open source Content Management Framework. Moving MSKCC.org to Drupal was my biggest project ever and my first large scale Drupal project. Once the project was completed in 2012, I documented the experience by posting a case study on Drupal.org.
Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is a wonderful client -- working with them is a gratifying experience and I continue to be dedicated to improving their website and online presence.