Steve Dixon
This is me, I work on the web.
I'm a web developer for Wesley Mission in the middle of the Sydney CBD. Working for a church-based non-profit organisation can be a challenge at times, but it's very rewarding.
I guess "web developer" is a bit of a nebulous description. My time can be spent pumping out (near-valid... we use a CMS...) (X)HTML, CSS and Javascript, back-end server scripting, supporting our team of .NET kiddies, installing apps or servers and generally fixing stuff.
I do the odd bit of freelance work (mostly for friends or associates) and work on my own projects too. I'm branching out into Ruby on Rails, but really can only call myself a beginner if I'm honest with myself.
I lurve playing bass. Had to mention that somewhere.
I love the community around what we do. Most of the people who hang out at things like WDS, WSG, Webjam, et al, are really trying to make the web better for everyone. I like that.
There was no web to speak of when I started my working career. It was a world of mainframes and finance for me before I started dabbling in websites back in 1995, when the web was new and filled with rotating .gifs, frames and blurry background images (well, after IE4 or so). Ewwww.
We've come so far. So much of the web is more beautiful and more usable now. Yet I STILL stumble across websites that present the same horror of those fledgling sites. So much work yet to be done.
That's where we come in.