A web developer by any other name...

Hi, my name is Tim Ouellette, and I’m a web-dev wanna-be.

There, I’ve said it. It’s out in the open for all the world to see.

I am not completely new to web development. In 1999 I started a web design side hustle I first called Classic Web Design but then later changed to Datalink Communication Services. I was thirty-three years old with a growing family and wanted to make my mark on the world. So, with a limited (but growing) understanding of HTML and CSS I started my venture, secured a website, and went out to claim my territory in the .com world.

I managed to scrape together a handful of customers, local businesses anxious to be at the forefront of technology and get their businesses on the web. I was strictly front-end development; I designed the sites but did no behind-the-scenes coding. My sites were primarily clean text, well-placed images, and a fair amount of white space.

I didn’t make a lot of money; enough to buy my kids some gifts & purchase some software for my business. I was definitely small potatoes but it was still an exciting time for me, communicating with my customers and updating their sites.

It was, however, short-lived.

In 2001 my very first customer pulled me aside on one of my weekly visits to tell me that, while she appreciated everything I had done for her, she was going to have to stop using my services. No real reason behind it; it simply wasn’t something she wanted to do any longer.

I thought, oh well, it’s just one customer.

But then it snowballed.

One after another my customers left, citing business changes, a lack of site visits, etc. Perhaps it was my lack of SEO knowledge that did me in.

In any event by December of 2001 I was a business in name only with no customers and approximately $1,000 dollars worth of debt to pay. I pooled my resources, paid off my debt, and chalked the whole thing up to experience.

I continued working full-time throughout and eventually landed a management position with Canon. I threw myself into my work with long hours and even longer meetings. I really enjoyed it and stayed in management through a couple different companies. Throughout all this I continued to think about running another side hustle, throwing ideas together, researching websites for business and services that could possibly be tweaked and improved on, but nothing ever really caught my eye.

Eventually I left management and took a lower-profile tech position with a company called Industrial Protection Services which services and supports Fire Departments and Fire Fighters throughout Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont. We service a wide variety of Fire Fighting equipment from extrication tools (Jaws of Life, spreaders, rams) and fire station air compressors down to the very air packs firefighters wear when entering into burning buildings. It’s a very fulfilling job and I enjoy it very much.

That being said my passion for web design never truly left me and so I recently started re-learning all the things I’d forgotten over the past twenty years. My plan is to learn not only front-end development but back-end as well, the coding that goes behind successful websites. I’ll be learning about new and exciting (well, new to me) things such as Git, GitHub, and Ruby on Rails to name just a few as well as re-introducing myself to the latest versions of HTML and CSS with some database programming thrown in for good measure.

My long-term goal is to take at least a year studying and practicing then start another side-hustle, start gathering new customers, market my newly-found skills and build my one-man operation (again) from the ground up. I really do enjoy my full-time job and will be doing this strictly part-time…for now.

I’ll be blogging about my new experiences, the different coding skills I’ll be learning, the online resources available to new and experienced web developers, hopefully with a writing style that is at times engaging and irreverent.

So if you’re new to programming and would like to subscribe to my blog and learn along with me please, go right ahead. If you’re a seasoned web developer and just need a few good laughs, then this too might be the place for you.

Either way, it’s going to be a fun and exciting journey for me, and I hope you’ll join me.

That’s it for now.