Addicted To 1’s and 0’s

Welcome to my tech/web blog, my parents call me Brent Terrazas. I’m a Interactive Project/User Experience Manager living here in Atlanta, GA. Originally born and raised in sunny Pasadena, CA, though I somehow found myself here after finishing my undergraduate degree in Dallas, TX at Southern Methodist University in what now seems like ages ago.

From The Beginning of Time:

I’ve always been somewhat of a dork, I think one of my most memorable memories of being a youngster was when my family bought an Apple IIe. From the second that old clunker booted up for the first time I found myself mesmerized at the thought of what I would be able to use it for. I spent countless hours noodling around on that machine, after getting bored with the programs we had available I one day found out that I could create my own programs by following the “Starter-Guide” included in the uber-thick manual (which yes, I was that big of a nerd I read from cover to cover). That then opened up a whole new world of possibilities. I had a tool that would react based on what I programmed it to do. I think the first sucessfull code I concocted was a way to cheat one of the games my parents had purchased (A txt-based RPG which involved swapping out one of 11 floppy disks depending on which direction you traveled in). Now I don’t know if you’d consider that a “healthy” introduction into programming but for me it was all that was needed to turn me into a geek for life

The BBS Years

Luckily I had brothers who were more concerned with sports than the noisy box that I was always tinkering around on in the guest room and eventually my days of experimenting with the clunker became a thing of the past. Sports and elementary school took over and it wasn’t until I was actually in 6th grade and we “upgraded” to an Apple Performa 575 that my interest in computers was re-ignignited. These were back when no one knew what the internet was, and BBS’s were king. That only added fuel to the fire. The ablity to dial-up a multi-node BBS and be able to share files, converse, and even play games against others all through the phone lines amazed me.

And Then There Was Caltech

It was about this time that I also came across another discovery that would change my life forever. See, the school that I attended happened to be directly across the from a college where I one day discovered one of their many computer labs. Rows and rows of networked computers, all connected to the internet. I was in heaven, and being a pretty young 13 year old, no one thought twice about me spending hours at a terminal playing games and learning this thing called “HTML.” Everyone most likely thought I was just a professors son waiting for a lecture to end. Following a flyer I found shortly after led me to a “Caltech mac user group meeting” where I was the youngest by at least ten years. Lucky for me these college kids thought that was pretty cool and a few took me under their wing, providing me with books, code examples, and even my very first email & dialup account so that I could access the network from home. Yes, I was a 13 year old with a darwin.caltech.edu email account (years later I would find out that apparently was a big deal in the land of geekdom). In order to check my email I also had to learn how to navigate through a unix shell.. which would prove useful later on in life when setting up linux machines to try and test sites.

Then Puberty Hit

Anyhow, by then I was in High School and befriended two other kids who had similar interests in making websites and we formed our first company, DarkSky Technologies. Making websites for the local SGVMUG was our first “gig,” followed by a few for various local businesses (and one school). The idea that people were willing to pay a bunch of 13-14 year olds to make them a website to promote their businesses was something that I found pretty surreal. Looking back, I also learned a lot about business management from that experience - from my first attempts at trying to negotiate a rate for web developement to all the issues associated with allocation of work (more importantly the eventual allocation of the money that was earned) amongst the three of us. After a while we eventually disbanded due to lack of interest, however throughought High School + later College I would try to keep sharp by coding websites for various homegrown projects.

My Role In The .Com Crash

I just “knew” I could come up with the next yahoo! and was always scheming as to what my next venture was going to involve. I never did end up creating “the next Yahoo!”, the closest I ever came was selling only one of my projects - a community based photo sharing website (phanpics.net), to a Venture Capital firm that was trying to create something that would have been similar to what Flickr is today. A measly few grand for a site with 13,000 registered members + over 100k photos felt like gold to me (I, once again, learned from the experience…I easily could have made a few hundred thousand off of that deal had I known how much it was really worth). The contract stipulated that they’d take over the site and incorporate it with their own platform, eventually disbanding my phanpics domain for their larger photo gallery community. They never reached that stage though as this was towards the tail end of the .dom bubble, and when it burst they were one of the first groups to have to vacate their plush studio loft offices, with my three years of work creating this community ending up being unplugged and the server rack sold off in foreclosure. I will give them the proper credit though, they were a nice bunch of folks, just the timing was off. They even tried to offer me a backup of the site/database to continue it as a non-profit, but then realized their outsourced IT company had already repossessed all the data cartridges that housed all the info.

My Life as an Advertising Junkie

On top of being a self-proclaimed dork, I also have what you could easily describe as an obsession with the advertising industry, that being thanks to an an advertising course taken freshman year at SMU. Although this is the last thing my parents probably would want to hear, that class was the only one I know for certain where I had perfect attendance for the entire semester. Shortly after I followed a friend to Boulder, CO for the summer, finding myself both an internship at a small agency there and also the summer of a lifetime holding a second, psuedo-internship for a local record label, then spending my nights working for tips at one of the bars on ‘the hill’. At the end of the summer I returned to Dallas knowing what my true calling in life would be - advertising. I then lucked out and got an internship working on the McDonalds and Uniden accounts at an agency in town called Moroch/Leo Burnett (now called Moroch Partners). Loved it so much I stretched the internship out for two back-to-back semesters. It was also my experience there that gave me the necessary push to continue my web/coding efforts, only now trying to come up with a way to merge my two obsessions. That was how Everything’s Better With Brentter was born.

That site has taken many forms over the years, first being a hack’n’slash site thrown together using code “borrowed” from various parts of other sites I liked, then later incorporated a framework called NukePHP until I ultimately settled on the Wordpress platform.

The blog has had it’s ups and downs - In November of 2007 it was voted one of the top 20 advertising blogs on the internet by Beyond Madison Avenue, however since then, the strenuous life of working for two small/mid-sized agencies, each trying to establish an interactive dept. from scratch, would have the blog fall to the wayside in exchange for late nights spent working on project workflows, wireframes/UI standards, and occasionally even writing long copy to fix last-minute nightmares.

Looking to the future

2008 brings new light though, to both my old site, and this new endeavor. My new years resolution for 2008 is to get back into the routine of blogging, and now that I have a place to store all my non-advertising related material, I have no excuses to not post (or at least that’s what I’m telling myself).

What’s Under The Hood You Ask?

As I said earlier this site is powered by the WordPress engine, using Fen’s lightweight Hello : ) theme as a base that I then modified to my likings. This site is updated on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro running Leopard 10.5.2, a boot of 10.2 OpenSuse, and various other dev environments via VMware when needed. Although I’m an avid Adobe fan, I primarily use Coda when hand-coding sites, MarsEdit when updating my blogs, and NetBeans whenever I try and trick myself into believing that I can teach myself Ruby on Rails. While I’m giving software shout-outs, If you don’t have the following software currently running on your computer, you are living a terribly sheltered life (all are free/opensource):

Some of the commercial software I can’t live without would be Adobe Photoshop, OmniGraffle Pro, and VMware (for running both dev environments, MS Project and occasionally Visio for whenever clients send over their own templates that they want me to use for freelance IA work.)

I used to use Apple Mail + iTunes but now have jumped on the Mozilla Thunderbird and Songbird bandwagons (if you haven’t heard of them, they’re both open-source projects which give you a completely different set of email/music capabilities. And Yes, Songbird works seamlessly with any version of mp3 player, including those first gen. Ipods)

I hope you find something usefull on this site, and if you don’t, then adios amigo, this site is more of a storage place for what I find than it is for a means of advocating anything geared at increasing site traffic. But take a look around, I’m sure something will raise an eyebrow or two.

I’m always open for discussion on new projects, technology, freelance, or even full-time positions, you can reach me via either the form on the contact page or by emailing me directly:
brent (at) addto10 (dot) com

Cheers,
Brent