Jordan Brock
This is me. I work on the web.
I started building websites when I was working for AOT Consulting in 1995. What began as an extra service offered to our clients became an almost fulltime job. In 1997 I left and started Spin Technologies, working in a corner of the spare room in a crappy rental in Northbridge.
Spin waxed and waned with the prevailing trends, moving into offices in Money St in Northbridge, and at one point having 5 staff. After a world jaunt getting married in 2003 I decided that I wanted to work on my own again. I was running a business and wasn't doing much development, and missed it. (That and the fact that I pretty much sucked as a business manager ;) )
Spin continued quite happily, once again working from home, for a few years. Over this time I was doing more and more work for Five Senses Coffee, working on the website, and a couple of intranets that they needed to run their operations. Eventually I was working 3-4 days a week just on Five Senses stuff, and Dean, the owner, made me an offer only an idiot would refuse and I started working full time in July 2007.
I used to be a die hard MS apologist, working in (and perversely enjoying) ASP.Net 1.1 and C#, happily ignoring the open source world. Then sometime around August 2003 I saw a screencast on RubyOnRails and I was blown away. I bought myself a shiny new iMac, learned Ruby and before I knew it I had transferred almost all of my sites to RonR and was a full time rails bitch.
This post is part of the "I Work On The Web" meme that is gaining traction. Check out the other stories.