Here's the part where I tell you all about myself, and that's not something that comes easily. Not that I suffer from debilitating shyness or anything, I'm just not the type to toot my own horn. So where to start?

I'm a frontend developer with Dotdash Meredith, the fine folks who bring you People magazine, Better Homes & Gardens and Entertainment Weekly, among many others. Before that, I was a developer with Gannett, the newspaper company most famous for publishing USA Today. I've been in the newspaper industry since graduating from Iowa State University with a degree in journalism back when pica poles and proportion wheels were still a thing, but getting to "developer" took a somewhat circuitous route.

I don't want your life story. Just skip to the end.

I started out as a copy editor at the Omaha World-Herald. This was before everybody had a personal computer, but they were definitely something I thought I should check out. So I moseyed on over to the Nebraska Furniture Mart's electronics store and came away with a Macintosh Quadra 610 — 25 MHz of screaming power with a 230 MB hard drive and an inexhaustible 64 MB or RAM, all pumping thousands of colors to an expansive 14-inch CRT monitor.

The arts beckon

I was friends with the graphic artists at work, and they "loaned" me the installer disks for Adobe Photoshop and Aldus FreeHand. I spent many a long night running through tutorials in books like The Photoshop Bible and decided computer graphics were a lot more fun than catching subject-verb agreement errors and misplaced apostrophes. I moved to the graphics department and started building maps and bar charts, color-correcting photos and registering color separations on pages for the camera.

After a few years of that, I moved to Lexington, Ky., (followed my future wife down there) and spent a couple of years at a small marketing firm honing my Photoshop and Quark Xpress skills while waiting for a job to open up at the local newspaper. An opening did eventually happen, and I joined the graphics department of the Lexington Herald-Leader.

My old Kentucky home

The Herald-Leader was great in that I got to do a little bit of everything: photo illustrations, news graphics, 3D renderings, pencil sketches. It's where I really cut my teeth on the trade.

Lexintgon was great, too. I really liked the city. It was just the perfect size with lots of golf courses and hiking trails and good restaurants. The one thing it didn't have was a reputation for great schools, something that became important with a 4-year-old and 1-year-old underfoot. You know who did have a great reputation for eduction? My home state of Iowa. So in 2004, I sent a resume to the Des Moines Register, the newspaper I grew up reading, the newspaper that inspired me to study journalism at Iowa State, and lo and behold, I was hired.

The graphics department had four other artists, so it took me some time to carve out my niche there. There was Mark, a world class illustrator, and Katie, a wonderful designer, and Kelli, a wizard at organizing and researching a project, and Scott, the 3D illustration guy. Scott left just a few months after I joined, which turned out to be fortunate for me, because it left open the role of 3D illustrator, which I gladly claimed. Check out the graphics and illustrations pages samples of my 3D work.

The digital frontier

All of this was about the time the Internet was really starting to cut into the print business, so there was a push to put our work on the web. For us, that meant interactive graphics, and interactive graphics meant Flash. (Just typing the word still makes me shudder.) One of the things I had done when I bought that Quadra 610 was dabble in programming. I learned the C language, completed a few game programming tutorials, and even bought a couple of volumes of Inside Macintosh, the official Apple developer documentation. With that background, Flash and it's scripting language, ActionScript, was a breeze to pick up, and so my transtion from graphic artist to developer had begun.

Flash had it's pros and cons — lots of cons — but it was relatively easy to produce engaging interactive graphics on the newspaper's daily deadline. I did my share of games and quizzes but also a few larger scale projects of which I remain proud to this day: On the 50th anniversary of Buddy Holly's death near Clear Lake, Iowa, we published a project that made heavy use of Flash; and when a tornado decimated Parkersburg, Iowa, we built a map that showed the extent of the destruction with before and after photos and survivors' testimony.

As I gained experience building interactive graphics, I worked on more data-driven graphics, stuff like election results, economic indicators, high school sports tournament results, etc. Out of that grew a need for me to learn some of the backend technology that stored and served up the data. The Register's website, and a few subsites built on WordPress, ran on PHP backed by MySQL databases, so I quickly picked those up. Where there's data, there's a want to manage that data, so I learned how to build admin dashboards for editors to access. For that I honed my knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript and frameworks like jQuery and Backbone. It's also where I developed my affinity for building dashboards.

A quasi-career change

As more of my workload became developer-centric, I moved from the Register's graphics department to the dev team. About this time, the newspaper industry was undergoing tremendous upheaval as subscriptions and ad revenue continued to decline. Gannett's reaction was to consolidate duties wherever it could, and not long after my move, it decided local development teams were a luxury, and I was moved into a regional team.

As part of the Local Digital Soulutions Network, I still worked on projects for the Register but also stuff for other newspapers. In learning to develop for Presto, Gannett's company-wide content management system (CMS), I learned Node.js, Express and Angular. I put that knowledge to work building Pressbox, an internal analytics dashboard for Gannett reporters, and as a lead developer on The Wall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning project reporting on the U.S.-Mexico border fence.

Based on that work, I was offered a position in Gannett's Storytelling Studio, whose purpose was to break new ground in digital storytelling, finding unique and original ways of engaging readers. We took text, images, video, audio, maps, charts, 3D models, VR, AR — everything was in our toolbox — and dreamed up new approaches to presenting the news and compelling human interest stories.

As the newspaper industry continued to fall on hard times, it took a mandatory furlough week and a personnel cut to our team to get me to freshen up the resumé. I sent out a few applications and heard back from Dotdash Meredith, another publishing company with a presence in Des Moines. I accepted an offer and have been plugging away, trying to figure out their very custom publishing system since January of 2023. It's a lot of XML work, a smattering of Java, and next to no javascript, which is where I'm most comfortable. I know there are teams in the company that work primarily with javascript, so I'll keep my eye on the internal job board. Until then, I miss newspapers, but I don't miss the stressing about job security.

tl;dr I studied journalism in college, started out as a newspaper copy editor, switched to the graphics department, picked up Flash, became a web developer for Gannett, then moved to Dotdash Meredith.