Hey! I'm John
It seems Steemit likes a nice formal introduction so here goes!
I'm a 44 year old web developer from Western Australia. Since 2005, I've supported my family, working from home doing what I love. I get to work with great clients from all over the country building websites. Most of my work is developing in Joomla and building custom extensions.
My story
In 2004, I was working full time in a different industry, studying nights for an MCSD certificate. I'd built a couple of sites for friends and was offered some paying job which got me started freelancing. Here's my very first personal site on The Wayback Machine. OMG, it's bad. But at the time it was pretty cool.
A year later, I started using Mambo, then Joomla and uploaded a new site. This time I decided to specialise in Joomla. I marketed myself as a Joomla specialist. This turned out to be the best decision of my early career. Later in 2005, a Perth company contacted me looking for someone to help them build a number of sites in Joomla. It was easily several months work. This was the kick I needed to quit the day job and launch Viperfish as a full time business.
I few years later, I launched Joomstore with Noah Greenstone which is still very busy today. Noah handles all the quoting, invoicing and project management. I focus on the development and maintenance.
Together we've worked with clients ranging from one person businesses to Government agencies. Here's a quick run down on some of the work I've done over the last few years.
- Built sites for the likes of YMCA and RSPCA and many other nonprofits.
- Consulted to and maintained Joomla sites for Government agencies.
- Built countless templates for larger agencies.
- Built small personal sites,
- Sites for bloggers.
- Sites for small business.
- I estimate I've built or worked on over 250 Joomla sites.
- I also developed and maintain the FocalPoint mapping extension for Joomla which has over 100,000 downloads since April 2014.
In my spare time...
I have an awesome wife and 3 beautiful kids... well... 2 beautiful girls and a grumpy teenage boy. They are all active with dancing and sports so nights and weekends are pretty busy. I play acoustic guitar and love speeding and sliding down a hills on a longboard.