Bio
Hi! My name is Stephen Ferris. I’m a web developer by day, and a stand-up comedian by night. I also sleep. Welcome to my web development portfolio!
I originally created this as a single page back in 2011 when I was looking for work then. Now, 14 years later, I’m looking for work again, so I’ve resurrected that page and morphed it into a WordPress powered blog with a whole separate page that highlights my favorite projects that I’ve worked on over the years.
One day, back in 1999, a kid from Australia suggested I make a website for a club that I had created at school. I used to play computer games online using a service called GameRanger, which at the time was exclusive to the Macintosh platform, and that service was run by a man out of Australia named Scott Kevill, so a lot of people from Australia used it. Anyway, I found a really enjoyed the experience. I didn’t know any code then, I just used Adobe PageMill of all things, but already at the age of 17, I was very much into trying to push the limits of what you could do graphically. I made some pretty elaborate designs in Photoshop, and skillfully cut them up in such a way that I could map them out on a table layout in PageMill.
Eventually I moved on to Dreamweaver when I took a multimedia class my senior year and learned some HTML and CSS. For some reason, although I had been skilled at math in the past, I didn’t have the confidence to go beyond that and learn any real code until I’d been going to community college for a while. When I finally did take a course on Javascript and Perl, I couldn’t believe how much sense it actually made! I felt like a fool. The summer after that, I even thought myself PHP. With those skills, I was able to do some solid freelance work for a couple of years, and then landed a position with a small web development company called i-Tul Design & Software. This is where the nickname dev914 comes from. My phone extension was 914, and all the developer phone extensions started with 9, so I fantasized that I was the 914th developer, even though this was highly unlikely at such a young, small company. It’s far more likely I was the 14th or 15th developer.