Warren Harrison

Interactive / web developer

I have been an interactive developer, mainly building websites and web applications, since 1996. I began in the early days of HTML, Perl and pipe-delimited text files, and followed along as CSS and Javascript were introduced. Armed with my dialup internet access and shared hosting account, I learned a little about the BSD/Linux shell. A few years later I plunged into PHP and MySQL, even dipping my toes into ASP and SQL Server. I managed shared and dedicated servers and how to configure BIND DNS zone files and Sendmail. As I got more into application development, I learned that we should normalize data and got more into the world of relational databases. From here I went down a series of rabbit holes in order to serve current projects. I learned about novel and efficient ways to store hierarchical data. I built dozens of data-backed screensavers with Actionscript. How many variations on a clock does one need? Every brand can have their own! I learned that every large website is useless without a content management system, and that building your own is hard. I took a brief tangent into the worlds of Processing, computer vision and symbol tracking for a few tangible interactive projects. From there, I added Ruby/Rails to my daily work and began to use it with PostgreSQL (it's faster… wait, no it's not). I configured shared and dedicated environments that pre-processed PHP or Ruby code (Passenger, Unicorn, Puma, etc) and handed it off to the web server (Apache or NGINX). I learned to modularize code and keep the presentation away from the business logic, and then, that working that relational data was old-fashioned and nosql, document-based database were the future (MongoDB). More recently, I learned about the Jamstack, React and its frameworks, Gatsby and Next.js, where the presentation is once again, tightly coupled with the components logic. That Javascript rules now. I learned that there is a 3rd-party service for everything, and that managing one's own CMS, hosting, database, email and DNS is a thing of the past. It's a changing world, and that's what keeps it interesting.

How can I help you? LinkedIn