About Don Stefani

My main tools as a freelance developer are PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML & CSS. These tools fit the needs of the majority of my clients and are open source so they are very economical to host and maintain. They are also, fun and exciting to use, they offer a huge array of possibilities and applications.

Some background...

I can remember when I recieved my first copy of Netscape Navigator, I was able to leave the dimly lite ASCII cave of the Internet to a complete new World Wide Web - with graphics!. The best part was that Netscape had the HTML editor where I started building my own website.

Soon friends wanted me to build them sites and not long after that I decided to start doing it full time. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time I was in the heartland of "Internet Start-Ups".

I worked for a couple of great companies, mostly as a front end, or client side engineer. At one of them, Global Digital Tech is where I got interested in programming. They were great about training and I began to learn CGI/Perl, SQL and Database design. I was also introduced to a new language there called PHP. I was transferred as a contractor to a sister company of Global Digital, Pacific Metrics where we used PHP and MySQL to build a large online Testing and Assessment site for the state of Louisiana.

For most of the next decade I worked as a freelance developer for numerous companies and organizations. In 2008 when the economy slowed, I accepted an invitation from another programer I had worked with to come to work at Bodybuilding.com. There I worked on enterprise level PHP and MySQL projects. And gradually migrated into Java and Oracle, and migrated away (What's up with Java?).

Having spent most of my adult life working for myself, after two years I resigned my position at Bodybuilding.com to go back to doing what I love. Freelance web development work. It allows me to work on so many diverse projects, it's never dull, that's for sure.