About
Background
Tim is a South Florida native, born in Hollywood. His interest in computing began in 1993, when he played games and composed short stories on the family computer. That interest grew into aptitude in a few years, and before long, Tim was progamming in QBASIC. The same curiosity and love of learning guided him to the code behind webpages, HTML. He began experimenting with his own website, copying code from other sites and modifying it to make it his own. Tim learned quickly with this hands-on approach, and was well-prepared for his first exposure to formal HTML training in high school.
Programming continued to be Tim’s main interest. His casual familiarity with BASIC lent itself to programming in TI-BASIC on the programmable calculators used by his school. Geometry, Algebra, Trigonometry, and Calculus lessons were all translated to programs on Tim’s TI-83 to assist with homework. In addition to grokking the math lesson, he learned problem-solving concepts by challenging himself in this way.
Education
Tim is a member of the inaugural class of the College Academy at Broward Community College. His graduating class was the CA’s first to earn a high school diploma and Associate of Arts degree concurrently. Tim’s AA in Computer Science expedited his transfer into the Computer Engineering program at the University of Florida’s College of Engineering. There, in a course titled Computer Programming using JAVA, Tim learned the basic concepts of object-oriented programming.
At the start of his second year at UF, Tim switched to the Decision and Information Science program in UF’s Warrington College of Business Administration. His consulting-oriented major included introductory classes to modern programming languages like C# and VB.net (ISM 3254 and ISM 3255, respectively), as well as courses focusing on database systems (ISM 4210) and the internet (ISM 4221). Other college coursework rounded out his business education, such as Principles of Marketing, Principles of Management, and Business Law. Tim graduated on May 5, 2007, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration with a major in Decision and Information Sciences.
Career
Tim’s career in web development began with his introduction to the PHP programming language and MySQL database management system in 2004. He started a professional career in March of 2005 when he began working for the Occupational Therapy Department of UF’s Public Health and Health Professions College. There, he assisted Elena Casson in the organization of ICADI 2006, an international conference. Tim worked with the three other IT team members to manage the conference website and other websites maintained by the OT Department. During the 19 months he was employed there, Tim continued his education in PHP and web development in a LAMP environment (including the use of JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML), and was the department’s MySQL specialist.
Tim left OT on October 26, 2006, to practice web development as a freelancer. His first client was American Nautical Services, a Fort Lauderdale marine bookstore, ship chandlery, and marine surveying company. Tim took over the reins of the company’s e-Commerce site amnautical.com and launched its second e-Commerce site, MaritimeCompliance.com, on January 4, 2007. He has since learned the Perl programming language and how to manage a server environment in Linux.
Today, Tim works from Gainesville, Florida, as a web developer, SEO, and owner of MrGossett LLC.
Professional Development
Since the start of his professional career, Tim has sought out training to keep current with changing technology and best practices in his profession. To that end, he subscribes to A List Apart, an online magazine “for people who make websites.” He also subscribes to the resources offered by SEOmoz, a Seattle-based SEO company which “serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services” (such as the premium membership Tim maintains).
