Welcome to my personal site. I was introduced to computers in the 80’s. Early on, I was programming in Pascal and was always trying to work on video game concepts and ideas. I made a side-scrolling game, an adventure/RPG style game and eventually a Street Fighter 2 clone in Pascal. I had coded an art application which helped to make it easier to generate the code needed to create characters or backgrounds for my games as well. When BBS’s were all the rage, I used PCBoard for my own Bulletin Board System. Using PCBoard’s scripting language called PPL (PCBoard Programming Language), I created a "Rumors 2000" PPE (PCBoard Programming Executable). This allowed users to submit one line rumors or jokes that would then be randomly shown at the bottom of the BBS’s menu.
I started inline skating in 1995 and instantly became passionate about the sport. I went on to build my first full-fledged website around the year 2000. The site was called Havenskate.com and had around 350,000 hits a month at the best times. The early revisions of Havenskate.com also included a Perl script I wrote called Rumors 5000 that recreated the Rumors 2000 feature from the old BBS. Advertising revenue was just providing just enough income to keep the site afloat and since I was also busy with school and work, it was often one of the first things to get put on the back burner. I learned a lot about developing business relationships while working on Havenskate.com since I reached out to other skaters and business owners for interviews or partnerships. I frequently received products from companies to review on the site and worked with the Producer of the game Rolling to coordinate some exclusive blogs about an IMYTA event from a non-skaters point of view.
The site also gave me the opportunity to learn about PHP and MySQL and I developed a content management system for the site based around those technologies. This created the first social network of it’s kind for rollerbladers. The site was setup to reach out and give back to the community and sport that had brought me so much joy.
In 2004, I graduated with a double major in Business Marketing and Film from San Jose State University. Soon after graduating, I went to work for Cisco. I randomly reunited with an old friend I used to skate with frequently. Law and I decided to work together on a new project. We spent a few months refining a new CMS based off Havenskate.com’s and added features such as user submittable news. A new look and feel brought to life Rollerhome.com in October of 2007.
Follow me on Twitter – twitter.com/jeffsawyer.