Hey there! While the short blurb on the right seems appropriate as a bolt-on to the normal posts, I figured something slightly more meaty might make a good intro to myself and the history of 88West. I’ll admit, it’s strange writing this. I’m not one who normally likes to brag or self-promote (at least I don’t think I am?) but in the spirit of re-launching the site, kicking off a new leg in my professional career, and breaking down a few doors in the interest of self growth, let’s kick this party off.
I’ll preface this by saying I’m going to try and keep this mostly professional. While I’m sure about 2% of you may enjoy knowing my golf handicap, what soups I make when I need a comfort food, and what my go-to bar order is that seems overly personal. And let’s be honest, we just met. I’ll also preface by saying, this was over twenty years ago in the fledgling days of the web. Looking back on some of these images that I still carry around comes with a natural embarrassment and a healthy eye-roll or two, but it’s a part of the story (and who doesn’t love some good ole fashioned self deprecating humor). With that out of the way, it’s worth mentioning I think that I’ve been working with, in, around, for (insert other prepositions here) software, specifically web applications, for the better part of 2+ decades.
Let’s get to it.
Sometime around 1995 I met a kid who later turned out to be a good friend of mine. He lived down the street and was one of the first kids my age that I knew had a PC. I’d go over there after school to hang out, mess around, play Doom, and just relax. This quickly turned into a fascination, though, and I slowly started saving every penny from my job as a caddie to afford to build my own computer. I’d watched him do it, it wasn’t that hard – pretty much just putting Lego pieces together, but you know, really incredibly expensive Lego pieces. So I blew my savings, bought all the parts, and one cold Saturday morning I put it all together and hit that big beautiful power button and prayed for the best. With a long, slow ‘Errrrrrrr BINK’ it turned on. My parents, to this day, will tell you how impressed they were of this feat. To them I basically just landed the Mars rover. They thought I was in the basement with a face shield on and overalls, soldering motherboard components together. The truth is much less interesting but it worked and the rest from there was history.
As I got more into working with my fancy new PC, I started to play games online. I met new people, joined communities, hung around in IRC (yes, I’m that old) and otherwise just enjoyed my time with these new found friends. Ultimately, some of those communities grew into tight knit groups and we wanted to expand that and open the door to others but we had no presence, no face, no ‘door’ from which anyone could find us or, for that matter, enter through and so I decided to try my hand at making a website.
For coding, Notepad turned into HotDogPro which morphed into Microsoft FrontPage which eventually landed me in Dreamweaver (back then, Macromedia). On the graphic side, MS Paint got me the absolute bare minimum but I eventually started designing images in a free tool called GIMP and then later trial versions of Adobe Photoshop. The result was rudimentary at best, but it worked, and it got notice. Soon, I had other folks reaching out to me, gamers and strangers I had met online, asking me to build something for them too. One of which was for a ‘guild’ I was in for a game called EverQuest. 
The guild was called Invictorum, latin for ‘unconquered’, and it was one of the more well known guilds where I played. I decided to stretch my comfort level with this one and thought I’d muck around with SQL Server Express to see if I could get a simple members list going. Somehow, I did, and suddenly a members list turned into a roster, a newsletter, and even a screenshot archive. Unfortunately, however, I had turned my own PC into the server that was hosting both the website (IIS) and the database so I was using all my bandwidth for this thing and it had to run 24×7. My parents were less than pleased, staring at their new electrical bill, but I digress…
This lit a fire in me and I decided to take this to the next level. College was coming up fast and, at the time, Information Technology and Computer Sciences were basically meal tickets for life. I remember being in class in my third week at RIT and 2 guys from Motorola walked into the room, offered anyone who said yes a 15k signing bonus to come work for them, and those kids – like former mafiosos going into witpro – were never seen or heard from again. It was wild, but I stayed (and come 2008, I bet they wish they had too).
The skills I was learning were fantastic and I couldn’t get enough. Eventually I wound up meeting another guy on campus who convinced me that these were marketable skills, skills I could market now. I went online and looked at what it took to start a Limited Liability Company in the state of New York and was surprised at just how easy it was. A small fee, some paperwork, and a visit to city hall and that was that – Full Circle Designs, my freelance web development agency, was born. A friend of mine was starting a new PC Support company called JazTec and he reached out to me to help with his website. My first client, it was exciting and while I wish Full Circle went farther than it did, in t
ruth, I was only able to support a few clients in between working part-time and my studies.
It was around this same time that my coursework started piling up. Normally, that would sound like a bad thing, but it was feeding into a portfolio of sites, projects, and designs that I could use to propel my career. I decided I needed a place to centralize it all, someplace I could deploy everything I’ve learned into a single ‘wowable’ moment. I wound up creating a site called ‘myduality.com’ (admittedly, over the top, but it made sense at the time). I had this perfect vision in my head for it; an art gallery – except that all the paintings would be the work I’d be hammering away at all these months. It all came together over the course of the next few weeks and slowly it grew, ultimately becoming a launching pad to find me and hire me as well as something to add to my resume to help me land my first internship.
RIT required that you have a minimum of three internships at three separate companies before you were ‘eligible’ to graduate. It was…extreme, but if there is anything RIT was good at, it was getting their grads jobs and this was no exception.
My first gig was at a web design agency called ICOM based out of Albany. I and one other developer were their two
primary developers responsible for a couple dozen small one to three page websites for local businesses.
One of my prouder moments working at ICOM was for a company called RVOne. They came to us looking for a Flash landing page (all the rage back in 1999). I spent hours watching and rewatching the Flash intro made by this company called Balthaser. At the time, if you were anyone in the web space, you had heard about Balthaser, it was incredible. I wound up leaning into what they built and putting together a creative piece set to ‘Life is a Highway’ by Tom Cochrane (which we my boss, begrudgingly had to pay royalties for us to use). They loved it.
Another frame for the art gallery.
My next internship was for Bausch and Lomb, local (thankfully) to Rochester, NY. You may know them from their contact solution and eye drops. Myself and another
RIT engineer were tasked with building a marketing piece, in Flash, to help onboard new employees faster. It was corporate, I had ‘rails’ I had to work between and I didn’t love that, but the end result came out alright and my boss at the time was pleased, that was enough for me.
Funny anecdote… in my first week I made a presentation to all the higher ups about what it was we were going to do, how we were going to do it, and what we needed to do it. During this presentation I made the mistake of overly critiquing the database structure and how the design made no sense and basically made it that much more difficult to complete the project. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my boss was the one who built the database and I essentially just threw her under the boss in front of her leadership team. It didn’t look great, and definitely didn’t earn me any sympathy but I learned quickly when to keep my mouth shut. (But seriously, it was really bad, we’re talking no keys on anything and redundant data in multiple schemas. Sorry.) Regardless, that was another frame for the gallery.
My final internship was admittedly my favorite, basically full creative license with limited supervision and my boss thought I was some kind of savant. It was entirely unhealthy for my ego, but for a creative, it was Disneyland. Christa Construction out of Victor, NY. They tasked me (at an incredibly high level) to ‘Redo their company website’. That was it. I had next to no direction and limited time to produce results. After a few mockups, I had a path forward and I poured my heart and soul into that website.
Unfortunately, the wheels of corporate America can sometimes turn slowly, or get snagged altogether. Approvals, reviews, board members, no clear project owner – it all wound up adding days and weeks onto a project that really only had 2 months of runway (internships were 10w long). I got it as far as I could before my internship ended but sadly, I don’t believe it ever left staging but it did make the art gallery wall, of that you can be sure.
With the art gallery now complete, and my graduation at hand, it was time to head out on my own and see what the world had in store. In time, I wound up taking a Web
Developer/Sysadmin role at a incredibly small (~6 people) company that found, wrote, and submitted grants for people. The gallery had served its purpose and while I loved the site, in a way I felt I had ‘outgrown’ it. It felt too collegiate, too ‘class project’. 
I decided it was time to spin off something new, something my own, something I could use however I needed it on the highway of life. That metaphor, the highway, led to the idea behind 88West. I knew I wanted a .com domain and those were (are still…) at a premium. I also knew I wanted it to be symmetrical (eg. 33, 55, 66 etc). Seemingly every combination I tried was taken. 33 East. 44 North. Innumerable combinations, nothing took until 88West. It felt right, it looked right, and it fit the metaphor in my head – a digital trek across a virtual ‘route 66’ that was my personal and professional outlet. Over the years 88West morphed from one thing to another; a custom homegrown portfolio, a blog in Textpattern, a photo vlog in WordPress, a single white HTML page, a staging site to experiment with learning PHP, to simply nothing at all. Which brings us to today.
As I find myself turning a new page in my career, it felt appropriate to resurrect it, to once again ‘travel the roads’ of 88West, hoping, to guide me to my next destination. I could write more (I warned you I was verbose) but for today, for right now, this is as good a stopping point as any. I hope you’ll come along for the ride with me and see where the road takes us.
Adventurous-
-Peter