skills
PHP
I've made an extensive study of PHP and am familiar with procedural and object oriented facets of the language. PHP 5 offers some great features, including its improved OOP interface, allowing for more modularized, reusable code. Its relaxed rules allow for everything from quick, results-driven inline code to robust, organized, and complex structures, resulting in a solid and powerful language. I love the flexibility and agility of PHP, and love the power and strength it offers the projects I've worked on.
MySQL
This open source database system is a powerful growing thing. It is the backbone of so many great websites, and I've put it to good use building some amazing dynamic sites. Though I know MySQL well, I am still amazed at how many great features it has, and feel like I will always have more to learn, to the benefit of the sites I build.
HTML & CSS
I remember the early days of HTML and how exciting it was to create websites in the late nineties. Looking back, it's not hard to see how far this simple markup language has grown, along with its siblings CSS and JavaScript. Clean, well structured HTML documents are a great joy to work with and create, with clear semantic separation now possible.
CSS is the mate of HTML, allowing the separation of content and style. The ability to not just craft beautiful websites, but websites that can change their face in the blink of an eye with the application of well written CSS is a great force on the web today. With CSS, the days of using tables as layout tools for stylistic considerations is over - with W3C compliant HTML and CSS, the web is becoming truly beautiful.
JavaScript and AJAX
I love JavaScript. It is a funky loose little language which adds all the spice to the net. It's quirks across browsers are, granted, a pain, but the graceful ways one can work around them are a thing of beauty to me. While JavaScript is not an object oriented language, leveraging OOP techniques allows for some great scripts that brings life to the internet.
Adding AJAX into the mix changes the whole face of the internet. The ability to contact the server without a full page refresh is a still growing technology, often misunderstood and misused. I have great interest, and have had great success, with using AJAX not just wherever it could be used, but where it makes the most sense - it is all too easy to use AJAX as a heavy handed ax, where really it should be used as a scalpel. The face of the web is changing, and AJAX is leading the forefront of that change.
As JavaScript has become more and more important to enterprise level websites, various frameworks have come to the forefront. I’ve used Prototype, Scriptaculous, and am currently using JQuery to help increase the agility of my JavaScript.
Java and C++
Two languages I've studied and used but not mastered are Java and C++. I'll not lie - they're not my favorite languages to work in. However, the lessons I've learned from these languages are innumerable, allowing me to be a more nimble, powerful coder. I've a good working knowledge of Java, and the design patterns it makes good use of.
Graphics
My preferred graphics program is Fireworks, though I've a working knowledge of Photoshop as well. Graphics take the web from text based pages to things of surprising beauty and creativity - and while I am not primarily a designer, I love to design the graphics for websites. User interface is perhaps more important than the backend of a system - if the user can't use your site because the UI is terrible, who cares how graceful the code is?