About me

Hello. I’m Garrett Albright. I’m a web developer living in Humboldt County, California. (Yes, that Humboldt County. But no I don’t, and I’m not going to get you any either.)

I build sites with the Drupal content management system and framework, which is written in PHP. I’ve built shopping sites, real estate sites, sites for newspapers, radio stations and TV stations, and more - check out my portfolio page for some of my favorites. In addition to writing custom modules, I can also do a fairly decent job of writing client-side scripting with JavaScript (preferably via jQuery) and even Flash/ActionScript, if I have to. Also, I’m not much of an artist - as the custom-made theme for this site attests to - but I can take an artist’s mock-up and turn it into a working Drupal theme via the Zen starter theme. I’ve also built multi-site Drupal installations, both of the standard and the Domain Access variety. I’ve contributed modules to Drupal - here’s my user page on Drupal.org.

I wouldn’t call myself a sysadmin, but I have successfully set up production web servers using both FreeBSD and Windows (the client made us use it, all right?) with the Lighttpd and Apache web server daemons, respectively. And once I even successfully built my own computer.

So, yeah. I think I’m pretty hot stuff.

I started programming on a hand-me-down Commodore 64 when I was twelve-ish - just silly games and such written in BASIC. I kept tinkering through high school, eventually learning to build web pages in HTML. It seemed natural for me to aim for a Computer Science degree when I hit college, but I couldn’t hack the math classes - I blame it on my high school’s experimental “College Preparatory Math” program which it turns out did nothing to prepare me for college math, but maybe I’m just dumb, I donno. So I switched to English literature because I’ve always been good at reading, which is a bit like running a marathon because you like to wear shoes, but I was in college and just assumed everything would turn out in the end. I still tinkered with programming, though, learning my first bits of web application development from an O’Reilly book.

Upon graduation, I hit the streets in search of a job, finding nothing really relevant to my degree until I got a gig teaching English as a foreign language to students and adults in Japan. The experience of living in Japan was very interesting, but the job wasn’t something I was cut out for, so I ended up back home when my contract was up. After again not finding much to do with an English degree, I decided to try my luck again with computers. It was tough finding a job in my fairly rural area; though, given my lack of experience and formal training at the time, it might have been even harder in a less rural area. After a false start or two, I landed a job developing web sites at Precision Intermedia, a marketing agency that makes print, TV and radio ads in addition to really great web sites. At first I was working in straight-up PHP and MySQL, but after discovering Drupal and convincing my boss to let me give it a try on a few sites, it gradually took over my workload - and my life - until it got to the point where I’m essentially working in Drupal for eight hours a day, and loving it. Well, most of it.

I’m still trying to figure out what my next move is. I’d like to eventually move out of this area again, maybe even go back to Japan for a little while longer - but the planets haven’t aligned for that yet.

Hmm? You want to know more about me personally? Well, as I write this, I’m twenty-seven. Besides web development, I enjoy studying Japanese (whenever/wherever I can find a class around here) and stereotypical nerdy stuff like video games and cartoons. I have a guitar, but don’t know how to play it - yet. I’ve got almost 100,000 miles clocked on my ‘97 Geo Metro (a rebadged Suzuki Swift), so it will probably be falling apart soon. I used to give blood regularly until they falsely detected Hepatitis C in one of my batches and told me not to come back for at least six months. I am not a morning person, but coffee helps.