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).