Putting up a web site invites comment. It just does. I thought, in making this new site, that I'd put together an apologetic of sorts that explains some of why it looks the way that it does and a little about the tools used to build the site. Please send your comments to patrick at swdev dot com! I'd love to hear from you.

Conceit!

"Geez Patrick! The whole domain, a web site just about you! Why??"

Aw shucks.... You're right. It does seem a bit much. Just a minute, I'll go turn off the server....

Seriously, though, this kind of hubris and self promotion do not come naturally to me. I've long had trouble with the simple task of selling my skills and those of my teams. In the past months I've learned just how important sales and marketing are to any organization. Excellence in engineering, the quality and efficiency of one's code and the communication skills that make a team fly; all of those things, even should I possess them, does not make a successfull business. Marketing Matters!

As you read through these materials, then, please keep in mind that this is, in that sense, a marketing piece. I'll feel much better if I can imagine you know that as you read all this self serving drivel! And thank you for taking the time.

Appearance

Yes! You're absolutely right, the site is very simple, very plain. Why on earth would I present myself as a Web Developer with such an unimpressive set of web pages? The pages are plain for two reasons.

First and foremost Aesthetics! I am no graphic artist. Never have been. :) I enjoy playing with Painter and a tablet when I have the time. And I have a sufficiently experienced eye that "bad" stands out easily. I'm not fooling myself about my own artistic abilities.. This fact leaves me with two options: try to make graphics and have the site look the worse for it or keep it simple and call it e l e g a n t

Second, I really like simplicity. Not in the sense of blah, or boring, but the way that Jakob Nielsen defines it in his articles about usable sites. I can't claim that this site is anywhere close to the standard he raises, but that's my aim.

I ask you to look past the simple appearance and enjoy the content. I build the back end half of web pages; the part that makes e-commerce transactions, editorial management systems and database applications function. When you look at the beautiful sites I've been part of creating (and often architected and led), it's been with the help of many excellent graphic artists!

Tools

This site is built almost entirely with the Zope web application server. Powerful, wonderful tool.

That doesn't, however, mean that I do all my editing through the web. Nearly all my coding, for this site as well as everything, is done using Vim, a vast improvement on the uniquitous unix vi editor.

As you can see from my photos, all this work is done on an Apple Macintosh Powerbook G4. Simply the best laptop I can get my hands on. Over the years it's been Compaq, Sony, IBM and others. Right now, the best I can get is the G4 Powerbook. Use What Works! Nothing (very) religious about it.

On that powerbook, I'm running OS X because I want a Unix-based OS to mesh with all the web server work that I do. I actually run all the same tools, from MySQL, Apache, PHP and Python to Zope, Java and Jakarta, on this powerbook that I run on the larger Linux and Solaris web servers that my customers deploy to. The Powerbook, running OS X, is a great tool.