Jay wanted to be an artist.
Jay decided that perhaps he wasn't quite good enough to make a comfortable living as an artist, and he didn't want to starve, so he dove into graphic design.
Jay heads to college for an EDUCATION.
After graduating, his first job was hiring, training, managing and working with a team of graphic designers.
He loved it.
I supervised the in-house Graphics Office for the Kansas State University Student Union, which involved art direction, hiring and training student staff, project management and coordination with other departments.
After that Jay happened upon a fledgling web company in Tennessee.
Developed Web sites from concept to completion (graphic design and code) for clients in a wide variety of industries.
A few years later Jay took a stab at quasi-self employment doing all manner of design.
He made some awesome design stuff, but...
he didn't really know business well enough.
As Art Director I developed much of the design work for our clients: print media, web site design and web site construction, brand development, Flash media, and more. I also hired and trained staff and reviewed all staff design work.
Eventually, Jay got hungry and returned to the web company in Tennessee.
He learned a lot...
...and made some awesome designs.
Around this time, Jay had the pleasure of teaching at the local university.
PSD to html/css instruction for desktop and mobile (responsive). In-class critiques on students' work and art direction on projects.
Intro course exploring web development: html, css, javascript (jquery), PHP, MySQL. Students built a website with a form using client and server-side validation. Data was saved to MySQL and data was sent via email. CRUD for data was covered.
After many delightful years at ICGLink, but having fears the boss would retire and the new owners would sell all the cattle, Jay ventured off in search of new pasture.
Developed Web sites from concept to completion (graphic design and code) using Photoshop, html, css, javascript (jquery), PHP, Coldfusion, MySQL. Projects were often developed with a team of designers and programmers collaborating remotely.
After this Jay accidentally stumbled into much darker recesses of the internets.
Through much perseverance and toiling, Jay learned many new frightening things, like Nougat Packed Munchies, elasticized searching stuff and etc.
Jay's experience expanded to various recesses of the franken hydra stack and he collaborated with many brilliant engineers inside a flexible working framework thing where everyone worked hard to help each other survive the mounting burden of tech debt — whew!
He worked with amazing testers too.
Worked with other web developers on the company's various web-based systems (node, react, angular, backbone marionette, coffeescript / js, php, perl, mysql, elastic-search (json), redis).
After years of worrying about 3:00 am slack alerts, Jay's stress level peaked and he left for less stressful programming work.
He developed in coldfusion with a former co-worker from years ago. It was a timely break and the work was far less convoluted — just coldfusion, sql, html, css and dash of jquery.
Ahhh... that was more like it.
Developed coursework and training certification process in coldfusion for clients of the U.S. division of an international power supply company.
In April of 2021, without any forewarning, every career wheel fell off and Jay found himself moving from the keyboard to bristol board... drawing tablets. He began working on a decades-long dream to turn this goofy cow character into something more than just a sketchbook doodle. His first book was published that summer and two years later he had more than two dozen books published. The whole story is found on his web page (which he hard coded himself) at mrcowbooks.com.
If millions of people will purchase his books he'll never have to write code again!!
And now, sometimes when no one is looking, Jay will still draw...
and pray that he is awesome.
Jay is learning to take criticism.