A little about the Developers — Tiffany

It all started with a disappearance and a book

You could say I was an early adopter of the internet. I was first introduced to the “World Wide Web” through a 2400 bps modem and an America Online floppy disk in 1992. I met my late husband in 1994 through a chat room, well before online dating was a real thing. Also an early adopter, he had a small web page for his business by 1995, and in 1996 he fell victim to a very common trend back then — a disappearing web developer.

I’ve always been someone who likes to learn, so I found myself at Barnes & Nobles looking at web development books. I picked up the brand new “Intro to HTML” book, sat down on my Windows 95 machine, opened Notepad, and started writing HTML to maintain my husband’s website.

That grew quickly into a love. I found Paint Shop Pro and fell in love with creating graphics, and launched my first ever site — Tiffany’s Treasures — which was a free website graphic page. I wrote tutorials and offered Paint Shop Pro objects, many of which can still be found on About.com who acquired them from me when I moved on to Photoshop. I started an educational group called the Cyber Crew which had over 800 independent graphic designers and developers before disbanding in 2003; and I became a member of the group the Digital Divas which was an elite group of female developers back in the day. The Divas were early adopters of blogging, and I launched my first blog in 1999!

Over the years, my web development hobby grew to a full career. In the early years, you had to learn everything, so I consider myself a generalist with strong front-end skills. I have maintained dedicated servers, built basic CGI, Perl, and PHP programs, worked with some of the earliest CMS systems before settling on PMachine which grew into ExpressionEngine, have supported ASP.net and Cold Fusion sites, and and now work with Craft CMS and Hubspot as well.

At Epicosity, I fit the role of Web Director. I don’t get to code as much anymore, as a large portion of my role is now project management and department management, but we’re small enough that I do still get to return to my love — front end work — occasionally. My contributions here will likely be less technical than Elise & Tony’s but I hope to share a few gems of knowledge now and then.