Brad Harrington is a web developer who lives in La Jolla, CA with his wife Maureen.
He has a BS from UC Santa Cruz and did post graduate studies at San Diego State.
Over the past four years he has taken classes in SQL, PHP w/ mySQL, JavaScript, AJAX, Begining Flash, Flash Actionscript 3, Joomla CMS, Online Store Design, Advanced Web Design with Database Integration, Advanced Web Design with PHP Integration, Search Engine Optimization, jQuery, Cascading Style Sheets, Adobe: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash
Born in Ruislip England. My father was stationed there with the US Air Force, probably the Army Air Corp back then.
As a child we lived in Omaha, Nebraska for a short time and then moved to San Pedro, California.
At the age of 6, my family moved to Los Alamitos, California. We stayed there until I was 12, When my father retired from the military, he took a job with IBM and we moved to Thousand Oaks, California, where I completed High School.
When I turned 19, I moved to Santa Cruz, California to attend college. Stayed there until I was 26 and then moved to San Diego, California, where I still reside.
I worked for 12 years in the Geotechnical Industry, starting as a Soils Technician and ending as a Geologist. I was never able to find my dream job in that field of work so I went back to school and worked on a Masters Degree in Hydrogeology. I finished all my course work with a GPA of 3.3. While working on my thesis, I spent a year working for a small local firm that had a reputation for doing some of the best work in the region when I finally came to the conclusion that I wasn’t ever going to love being in this industry. Most of the interesting work was not coming out of California and the stuff that was, was too difficult to get. You needed more advanced degrees.
At this point, after talking things over with my wife, we decided to open a wine shop. Wine appreciation had long been one of my passions. I had been running a wine appreciation website since 1995 and knew a fair amount of people in the industry along with most of the current trends in production. I ran the shop until the economy took a dive and I just couldn’t maintain the growth needed to sustain a business in the luxury item field. We did not meet goals that we felt were required to sustain a healthy business and decided to get out while we could. You gotta know when to hold’em and know when to fold’em.
At this point, I needed to decide what I wanted to do with my life from here on out. I thought about trying to get back into Geology, but I knew that was kind of a dead end for me so I started thinking about the things I love and enjoy and what could provide me the opportunity to find work.
I had been working on websites for a number of years and was taking classes through the community college continuing education department. They have an excellent program that offers dozens of classes in the web design and development fields. I had taken classes at night there while working as a geologist years ago, and had begun picking them up again as soon as I closed the wine shop. I started to realize that I had an affinity for the technical side of web development. Many people in this industry have gone the design route and lacked the skills to create complex dynamic structures that are needed in modern Web 2.0 web sites. I dove in and took classes where ever I could find them, with the bulk of them through Palomar Community College. I have maintained a 4.0 GPA over the past 2+ years and plan on continuing to take classes to further my knowledge in the field.
