My name is Tommy Williams. I have spent most of my life behind a computer, whether it be programming, hacking or gaming (wow, that sounds pitiful). I am known to be very passionate about the things that I love, hence my reasoning for creating a blog: To share that passion.
Among those passions are:
- My family: Wife Rachel, Son Landon Fredrick (Bronco) and two dogs (Hazel & Archer))
- Sports (mainly football)
- Fun times (Cruises, visiting far away friends & fam, attending sports events)
- Programming & Web Development (mostly what I will be discussing on this blog)
My experience with the web dates back to 1994, when I was heavily involved in cool chat lines (IRC, Yahoo Chat, AOL) and wanted to join the 31337 h4x0r1n6 community. It was explained to me that learning to program and understanding web technologies was the beginning of that route.
I started by creating a basic website to help create my entity online. This was before javascript, in a time where frames and small animated gifs were the trendy thing. This helped spawn my love of the web and really gave me a reason to feel compelled to learn as much as I could. I always had an affinity to be the best at what ever it was I was doing at the moment.
Now that I had a name and a home online, I needed to give people a reason to care. The chatlines helped inspire me to further my knowledge of programming. I decided to pick up Visual Basic (3 at the time). This opened all kinds of doors for me. My main focus was to create programs that would enhance chat experience; the goal being that everyone in chat lines would be using my ‘proggiez’ (applications). After some time, my name was well known in the communities, and I was whipping out new applications every month or so, with new, never-been-done-before-features. The reward was immense.
Since then I went on to teach several classes throughout middle school, even creating my middle school web page. And through high school I continued down that road, and going into college I was 100% sure what I wanted to do.
I attended The University of Central Florida College of Computer Science. After grabbing enough credits to attain a minor in C.S. and Mathematics, I found that the I.T. program was better suited for me, as it had more focus on web technologies and security.
Since graduating UCF, I have worked at several companies, and opened several companies of my own (some were joint ventures with friends). Today I can say that I primarily work with front end technologies, mainly HTML[5], Javascript [ECMAScript 6/Next], jQuery, CSS[3], PHP & Java. Although I have dabbled in numerous languages and technologies along the way, I am currently very content in the client-side world.
Currently I work as a contractor Senior UI Developer at Office Depot where I primarily work with Javascript, jQuery, CSS and Java.
I also own Location Over Time LLC (a little self promoting here), which is a location based service that does GPS tracking on Android devices. That is an awfully simplified version of what the application does. My company represents the web application portion of the business, more information can be found on the software distributor’s website at http://www.displaytracks.com (Display Tracks LLC).