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To help those who are going through the hell Frear and I went through:
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Aaron Smiley is a human being that dabbles in enough stuff that he decided he was going to stop labeling himself, though what he most often gets paid to do is work in the field of Information Technology, especially web and database design.
Aaron has worked on websites since he was a junior in high school, where he created and ran an unpop underground school website called The Ram's Veil. The premise of this site was to publish the otherwise widely unread assigned writings of students at Cony High School, and also to unveil any nasty hypocrisies that his childhood mind felt cheated by. It was a little immature, but it was a start.
Aaron graduated from Cony and went to college for a degree in Music Education at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, but wound up changing his major on the third day, and graduated with a BA in Information Systems. During freshman year at SU, his website was spotted by the thorough and benevolent Roozbeh Tavakoli, then the Director of IT, or doIT for the ultramodern, and he was offered a job as a university web jockey, which he accepted.
At Susquehanna University Aaron learned about more technologies than you can shake a stick at, and he often has a difficult time keeping them separate in his head. There are three, however, that cannot blur in his mind, and those are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They have never once become DHTML to him, and they hopefully never will.
Aaron was taught ColdFusion and ASP as his server languages of choice while he worked at the Department of IT at SU. In his ventures to always find the newest and best technology, Aaron also chose to learn PHP on his own, and developed his own website (the one you are currently on) in that language for a few years.
For database technologies, Aaron learned Oracle and Access in the classroom, in parallel with ASP. He learned more about Access, and lots about Microsoft SQL Server at work for IT, where he was lucky enough to be chosen to redo the IT website, which he considers an honor.
Upon graduation Aaron took the opportunity and the downtime to experiment with the idea of sailing sunfish for a living, but after a few months no pay checks arrived, so he applied for the WebTech Specialist position at Saunders Mfg Co, and was lucky enough to land it. The job entailed (at the time of writing still entails) maintaining a ColdFusion eCommerce site that runs off of both MySQL and iSeries DB2.
His completed tasks there include, but are not limited to (in chronological order): replacing the acid-washed former layout with a new layout designed by the resident graphic artist, migrating the entire system from Windows to Linux, (which has been Aaron's primary operating system and hobby #254231 for years), creating an ever-growing, expandable extranet website that linked Saunders' employees with their suppliers and satellite locations in Mississippi and Fort Fairfield, Maine, as well as their Network Account Managers in NY, CA, and TX. He also introduced a new way for the company to interact with their IBM iSeries server that didn't require costly APIs, and allowed them to use standard DB2 complaint SQL commands instead of limited stored procedures. One of the more successful results of this innovation was a section of the Saunders website that allowed their B2B customers to login and check the status of their orders, drastically cutting back on calls and faxes, and thus saving the company tons of money.
Because of the ilk of Aaron's hobbies, he was also able to put together for Saunders a local Linux server that acted as both a local NAS, and as a company mirror of the website, providing Customer Service with a lightning-fast website that helped speed their days along.
Then one day Aaron redid his website in ColdFusion, (as he realized it was his favorite language), and when he was done re-organizing his content he realized he had taken everything off his main page, so he wrote a really long bio about himself in the third person.
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