Origin story

Posted 53 minutes ago

I have always had an interest in computers. I took some summer computer classes at our area vo-tech school when I was in elementary school. One of the highlights was getting to play games at the end of class. These games were text based–choose your own adventure games that involved knights and dragons. Those were the days of green phosphors on a black background computer terminals. No OS with a graphical interface like we are use to today.

During my senior year of high school, I took a basic programming class. I remember one of my projects I created an animated Jayhawk comprised of type characters. I am guessing that we used Basic for programming but I am not really sure. I had that on a “floppy” floppy disk and have no idea if it is still in my possession.

Early in high school, my family got a Radio Shack TRS-80 MC-10 computer that hooked up to the TV as a monitor. You could buy cartridges similar to the old video game cartridges for Atari or Nintendo to add functionality to the computer. I mostly played games on that computer. But one of the cartridges we bought allowed you do some basic graphic design–making signs with clip-art, etc.. At one point I used the program or the text interface of the computer to create a scoreboard for a table top game of baseball that I played, Whitey Herzog’s Great Game of Baseball.

I figured out how to space things out to look like a scoreboard. I think I had lineups and the inning by inning box score. It was modeled after the old electronic scoreboard at Royals Stadium. I would delete content, type in new content and add back in the spaces that I needed. I think I could save it so I had a framework to start with each time.

When I was in college, I would borrow one of my fraternity brothers DOS computer to write papers. I also had access to Apple computers in the computer lab in the architecture school and in the nearby Art and Design building. I remember creating flyers for our campus chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ and later writing some newsletters to communicate with donors who helped me to go on a couple of short-term mission trips.

When I got married, I had access to my own personal computer for the first time. My wife had bought a Mac Classic while in grad school. I used it a few times in college to write some papers but that was the extent of it. Pagemaker was one of the programs she had on the Mac. I loved being able to create things with Pagemaker. Besides our monthly ministry letter (we were both on full-time staff with Campus Crusade for Christ), I created several personal projects including a prayer calendar and zine about Hungary (we didn’t call them that back then). I enjoyed using the computer to give me a creative outlet.

When we reported to our first assignment at Kansas State University, we signed up for K-State email accounts and were able to access various computer labs on campus. It was in those rooms that I had my first encounters with the Internet. I loved being able to access different information from all around the world. I enjoyed surfing various sites that had to do with my personal interests. Those sessions were usually short as there were others waiting to use the computers. But it gave me a brief taste of this new technology that I was excited about.

Within the year, Campus Crusade created a site that allowed me to download and access resources for personal ministry and fundraising. I started to see the real value of the Internet was the sharing and accessing of resources because you could access them immediately instead of having to wait to have someone mail them to you. I loved that email allowed me to be more connected to some friends that lived in Europe.

I started tinkering with Web design in 1997. I needed a creative outlet and I wanted to understand how to build a webpage. After upgrading to a laptop that could connect to the Internet with a browser1, I learned some basic HTML from a workshop I found in the Compuserve community. The guy who had written those tutorials also wrote a book, Creating Cool HTML Websites. The foundation of my knowledge of Web development started with that book. The first site I designed/built used <frame>s. That site was a precursor to what later became bridgforthfamily.com.

My first site was not very graphic intensive

Two years after my first experience building web pages, we moved to Orlando to work at the World Headquarters of Campus Crusade for Christ. I was part of a leadership development project with a goal of figuring out my next career step. I worked in the ministry partner development office coaching new staff as they raised their initial financial support to report to their ministry assignments. I had mentioned to Campus Crusade’s leadership my interest in building websites so part of my job in Orlando was to work on a website to resource staff with tools to help them in their partner development. It started out as a few pages of a larger staff resource site which later became a multi-page site of its own.

It was during that year in Orlando that I began to understand things about my gifting and the type of work that motivated me the most. I saw the thread of my interest in computers running through my life and decided to pursue further opportunities to do Web design and development in Campus Crusade’s National Campus Office in Orlando.

After getting my feet wet with my first professional website in the ministry partner development office, I started working on GodSquad. The site resourced students and volunteers that were launching and/or leading new Campus Crusade ministries. I was able to use my ministry experience as a foundation for creative work on the Internet.

GodSquad redesign in November 2000, my first major project with the site.

That is my origin story.2 What started as a hobby–learning to build web page–turned into a career of 26 years and counting. What a great privilege it is build upon personal interest and to be able to provide for myself and my family. If you want to hear more of my story from this point, I would suggest reading The making of a webcraftsman, part 1.

A list of my different job titles

Some of these titles were given to me. Others were ones I bestowed upon myself.

  • Webmaster
  • Web Designer
  • Drupal Themer
  • Front-end Developer
  • UX Developer

1 Up to that point, I had been using a Mac Classic that my wife bought and college and came as a benefit to me when we got married. I connected to the Internet through a 24-baud modem that connected to a text-based Unix interface.

2 The bones of this article was the original about page I wrote for this site. I kept a copy of that content in Evernote and now in Obsidian.

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