Adam Cooper
... I work on the web.
As a child I was always getting in trouble for breaking our computer. After a while I got bored of games and started playing around with .bat and .sys files... eventually I figured out what they did and the breakages became less frequent.
Over time our computer became obsolete; That mattered little though as I'd discovered the outside world and was too busy out riding to touch my computer. High school, college and a few months of uni all past with only passing interest in the beige box, using it only for photoshop work.
After dropping out of an architecture degree I decided try my hand at computer animation; because it was mid-year though I jumped into a 6 month print pre-press course to pass the time. Half way through I was offered a traineeship at a local printer.
It was here my inquisitive (destructive?) tendencies again came to the fore. I was again breaking things, though I was learning along the way.
Someone took notice, and decided to use my skills for good instead of evil. I was asked to come up with a way of automatically creating business cards - initially I used a combination of Acrobat's javascript and applescript, but as the project evolved, I taught myself Perl, HTML and later PHP and MySQL. CSS and a consideration for accessibility came along eventually as well.
The business card app snowballed, becoming an online content creation system that had automated all aspects of the print process, from content creation through to delivery.
While this was going on my partner Karmin and I started up Laural Consultants. We were in the unique position that we could take on the web projects that we wanted to do - mainly it was for the challenge, something to keep us both learning.
In late 2007, Laural was contacted by two local entrepenuaers to put forward a submission to develop an online community . Taking a temporary leave of absence from the printers, I worked in-house speccing, designing and coding the site. Within 6 months I'd quit my job of 10 years at the printers and jumped into the role of CTO at Perkler.
It's been an awesome trip so far, but it's the road ahead that's really exciting. The web is changing the way we communicate with one another. It has the ability to turn long-standing social norms on their heads and give a voice to the individual.
Let's just hope that voice sounds better than mine when I'm singing along to Ed Harcourt at the top of my lungs.