The Jennifers

A couple of years before the turn of the century, I began studying web development at a community college and eventually was hired by the college to work on their sites.  The college’s program developer told me I would benefit more from real world experience than from taking more classes, so I got a job at a web shop where I was promoted to a lead position.

I got married, took a break from work and spent about six months learning to cook gourmet food. I still love to cook.

My next adventure was teaching web development classes at the same college I had attended.  The focus of my classes was to prepare students for real jobs using my own experience. One point I stressed was how to follow written instructions, as surprisingly enough, that had proven to have a steeper learning curve for me than the technologies I used.  Teaching was a very positive experience for me, I still think about many of my students to this day.

I got pregnant, quit smoking and ate chocolate brownies for breakfast every morning, a chocolate shake for dessert every evening, and in between, developed a customizable DHTML script I called ‘Form Validation on Steroids’.  I lost about 40 lbs before my son was 9 months.

As a stay-at-home mom, I mastered the art of homemade baby food and considered how I could turn teaching other moms all I had learned into a business. But my fascination with web development was too strong to resist. I continued to write JavaScript lessons on my personal site that I’d used while teaching and soon it ballooned to about 150 individual how-to articles. The site had enough regular traffic to generate a decent income through web hosting referrals.

In 2005, I began playing around with web page source code begotten from the lovely getElementsByTagName() method and built upon color-coding concepts I’d developed while teaching. Firefox extensions were all the rage at that time so I set out to put my ideas into the add-on embodiment.

View Source Chart was born.

During View Source Chart’s initial development phase I could think of nothing else.  At one point, my family was served pizza for dinner 5 nights in one week.

For the next few years, I maintained and improved the add-on.  It has appeared in Mac World magazine, several web development books including ‘Pro JavaScript Techniques’, written by the creator of jQuery, and was given the ‘Recommended’ (now called ‘Featured’) designation by Mozilla for a couple of years.  It is still available on Mozilla’s add-on site and is closing in on 1 million downloads.

Lately I have been making problem-solving elastic belts, including a new one that has no hardware at all - a feat I am very proud of. 

Another project I am currently working on is a zipper-pull attachment that I believe has fad potential, as creating a cultural fad has been a long-time dream. Another crazy idea I consider from time to time is opening a carry-out restaurant with a menu structured unlike any other.  I also hope to be granted IP rights for View Source Chart’s  GUI.  In the meantime, I regularly find myself surprised by problems I encounter on the Web, considering how far it has come:  I frequently think, ‘I should really try to help them.’