9 years in BC, the web and what's next?
Posted Friday, February 19th, 2010It’s been a great nine years here in BC.
Really, just top notch.
It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a decade since I came here from Edmonton and I actually can’t remember if I ever intended to stay in BC this long. I’ve met and befriended some truly awesome people (@justinlove, @xer0x, @adamtindale, @rossangus just to name a few) and as I’m preparing to hit the road for life 3.0 in Calgary I thought it would be a good idea to recap a bit of the last few years to see what got me here in the first place…
Part 1: My Short-lived Career in Broadcasting
I moved to BC in January of 2001 for an internship at CIFM in Kamloops which, after about a month, took an unexpected detour to Prince George when I was offered a job as a radio copywriter at CKKN/CKPG. It was an interesting enough job but it paid horribly (barely enough to pay student loans and rent) but it led to what I would still call the sweetest gig I’ve ever had – writer/producer in PGTV’s creative department.
Television was pretty different from radio… mostly because it was profitable. My client list was about half as long as it was in radio and instead of producing 3-4 spots a day I produced 3-4 spots a week. And it wasn’t just less pressure, it was a lot more fun.
But after about a year of hanging out with our video editors I decided that I had to learn more about video (Mike Clotildes and Mick Harper, thank-you!) and applied to University of Victoria’s Visual Arts Department. I still have a passion for video and continue to work in the medium as an artist, but a funny thing happened on the way to my Visual Arts degree: the web came of age.
Part 2: Life Online
While at UVic I worked at the Fine Arts Faculty’s Studios for Integrated Media helping students with multimedia projects and the like. One day my boss asked me to take a shot at redesigning a few websites. And it was pretty much the coolest thing ever. I started off mucking around with html and this newish thing called ‘CSS’ and soon enough had two major successes under my belt; the site redesign for my own Visual Arts Department and also for the Theatre Department (which is still live five years later, check it out!)
Soon enough I was doing contract work populating sites, designing layouts and getting my hands very, very dirty with php, javascript and css/html. Before long I was hacking ridiculous things together with stuff like Gregarius, Serendipity, Gallery and Broadcast Machine. I was particularly in love with RSS (and still am). Later I caught on to WordPress and Drupal, found jQuery and finally fell head over heels for front-end development.
I’ve never looked back. I’ve been lucky to work for great studios with amazing designers that love the web as much as I do, most recently at Veratta in Vancouver and before that with Trapeze in Victoria. Nothing beats working with creative people who love what they do.
Part 3: #YYC (aka. Calgary)
As unpredictable and frustrating as the web can be, I feel it is the most rewarding and exciting medium to be working in today. It is entertaining and inspiring and growing exponentially year by year. Almost every day it seems like we’re reinventing ourselves, improving how we work and most importantly, sharing our tricks, stories and success with each other. It’s frickin’ great.
So the final question is, why leave? Well Vancouver is heinously expensive for one. But mainly we’re moving so that my partner can pursue her teaching career – something that is at this time nearly impossible to do in Vancouver. An added benefit of moving to Calgary is to be closer to family which as we all know starts to gain importance as you get older. And I actually feel like I’m bringing a lot of the best stuff about BC with me anyway, because 99% of the people I consider close friends will still be there via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr… the list goes on and on. And I’m pretty sure that whenever I come back to the coast we’ll sit down over a pint and start catching up — not from when I moved away — but from when we last shared a story.
