About Mike Bradford
I am a web developer residing in Austin, Texas. I founded 47 Primes in 2008 to help businesses of varying size meet their needs through creating and implementing custom web applications.
I am highly proficient in PHP and Ruby (focusing mostly on the Rails framework). Furthermore, through a computer sciences curriculum at a local university where I have been a student since January 2008, I am delving deep into the world of Java.
As many others in the profession, I got into this field through circumstance. About midway through my undergraduate mechanical engineering program I was introduced to a professor in our department specializing in, among other areas, engineering education through electronic media. Soon after I joined his work as an undergraduate research assistant, creating mostly engineering- and science-oriented web sites and simulations using Macromedia Director. Upon graduation I joined a startup in Atlanta, Georgia, doing similar work. After the dot com bust of 2000, I found myself like many others in the tech field—searching for new opportunities with a firm of less layoff potential.
This search did not last long, though, as I was able to pursue a dream of becoming an overseas missionary, spending 19 months in the country of Cameroon with an interdenominational Christian organization called The Navigators. Ironically, it was in the bustling centre gouvernemental of Yaoundé, not in some tech-saturated city in the “developed world”, where I got my first experience creating dynamic, database driven web applications. The Cameroon ministry needed a web site to communicate with potential partners that could be easily kept up-to-date without using HTML and that could be dynamically displayed in both French and English. Armed with an old laptop, some open-source tools, and an account at a cyber café which ran at 75% uptime at best, I was able to get the ministry’s first site up and running.
That experience taught me that success in this field depends greatly on a do-it-yourself approach to learning. From there, I have embraced the open-source environment in which such learning thrives.
About This Blog
The purpose of this blog is to serve as a repository for my thoughts, experiences, learnings, and opinions concerning the web development profession, technologies, techniques, strategies, news, and management. My desire is to focus on employing solutions to specific problems. For example, I will highlight some of the more interesting and challenging techniques employed in the creation of this blog.
My writings are geared toward web programming yet as time passes I expect an assortment of subjects to be addressed. Hopefully anyone involved in the web development process – be it a front-end designer, database administrator, system administrator, beginner, or hobbyist – can find some useful information here.
Discussion
The privilege of writing about web development is that it caters to an audience of some of the best and brightest. I consider your comments to my postings as an extension of my own writing. You are strongly encouraged to correct or clarify my points as well as add knowledge from your own experience. My only requests are that your comments remain on-topic and that you remain respectful to others in the discussion.
Technical Features
This site is created using the Ruby on Rails web application framework. My interest in this technology remains high even as I learn and use other technologies. I employ some JavaScript and AJAX, namely in the posting of comments and the archives. However, all functionality should remain intact for those surfing with JavaScript disabled.
About The Laboratory
The laboratory is where I display working models of code I’ve written or mashups I’ve built. I won’t guarantee that all my code there will be error-free (hence the title laboratory), but I’ll try to list any known bugs.