Hi!

In addition to Tessa or Tess, I often go by the handle tessaract (on twitter and quite a few other places). I do a few different things to earn income. First and foremost: I design. I’m trained as a graphic designer/commercial illustrator. As a kid, I wanted to airbrush rock album covers, movie posters and sci-fi book covers when I grew up (Yes, you read it right: album covers. I’m that old. And I may grow up yet!).

I also program in a few scripting languages, primarily JavaScript. My specialty is is working with far less-than-ideal HTML markup, CSS and existing “legacy” (yeah “legacy”, you know what that means) JavaScript and despite the spaghetti underpinnings and fugly-insides, making it run like a smooth, clean and shiny Tesla Model S with an elated Matthew Inman behind the wheel (aka: JavaScript Magic). Oh, and when I can, I like to share what I know via writing posts, articles and books.

In the 90’s, I fell into multimedia (video, audio and animation in Director/Flash – remember CD-Roms?), and in the late 90’s, I fell into web development (“What? you want that CD-Rom’s design, video and audio on the web?! You know, it’s only 1997, right?!”). Along the way, I got deeper into programming (JavaScript, ActionScript, PHP a little Python), and I became absolutely fascinated with organizing data and content to work with it programatically (XML, JSON/NoSQL, MySQL/SQLite).

Most recently in the past few years, I’ve moved over to full OOP programming of not only Flash-based(Flash: It really did die. For me anyway.) and AJAX web apps, but desktop and mobile apps as well (Not very rock album cover-y, but pretty cool none-the-less).

So, What’s a Tessaract?

A tessellation or tiling of the plane is a collection of plane figures that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps — wikipedia.org

I’ve liked the word “tesseract” ever since I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time as a kid. The term is actually “tesseract” and while Madeleine used it to describe a type of time/space/warp portal, it is actually a hypercube or tetracube (hence the name of my LLC: hyper³media pronounced: hyper-cube-media). Yep, I spell tesseract incorrectly, on purpose, to have my name in there: tessaract.

“Tess” is a greek root that relates to the number 4. My name for example is Greek for “fourth born”. A tesseract is a 4-dimensional cube as we discussed and tessellation is the tiling of squares or things with 4 sides (like old-school desktop wallpaper), you get the picture.

When I’m not working, I’m probably…

Taking my my ex’s dog (hey, she’s an awesome dog) to the river with my partner (2013/14’s been “fun”). Playing with our daughtERS (We have two now! – yes, 3 years later I’m still surprised I have two kids). Noodling on a guitar. Wondering how I’ll handle my first THIS winter in Minneapolis (#NotANative). More recently, spending quality time with my wonderful, super-patient, understands I’ma-little-busy-these-days, girlfriend. And as always, trying to find a better, faster way to do things on my mac or with my brain – and then hack it some more. Taking an online course and reading a non-fiction book (I’m happiest when learning something new – sometimes, fiction squeezes in there).

• CargoJS: Time for some updates and documentaton to this powerful little “Git Gist” jQuery plugin of mine (I’ll also be bringing Cargo’s friends: Enquesto and Eligio out into the light)
• The Disorganized Disaster’s Guide to GTD and Time Management: An eBook? An online course? I’m not sure yet. But if GTD and various Time Managment/Productivity systems seem to fail you – you’ll find out why (it’s you) and how to get back on track (in spite of yourself, and that convoluted “productivity system” you’ve bought into.).

All current titles published by Packt Publishing

• WordPress Theme Development – Beginner’s Guide
• WordPress 3.0 jQuery
  Enhance your WordPress website with the captivating effects of jQuery.
  
• WordPress Theme Design (2nd Edition: WordPress 2.8 Theme Design)

• Joomla 1.5 Template Design Covers the new jdoc tags, template overrides and custom module chrome!

• Joomla Template Design
  A great title for sites that still opt for the Joomla 1.0 legacy version.

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