Ten years ago Shawn began his professional career as a Junior Programmer for a local company, providing independent pharmacies with customer management and prescription billing systems. When not at work Shawn bolstered his Visual Basic skills with classes at the local Community College, continued his hobby of freelance desktop publishing and design and worked on his second sofware application: The CD-ROM Photo Album Kit, an authoring system for making user-friendly CD Photo Albums.

With independent pharmacies closing down and being sold to large chains, Shawn moved on to the arena of computer game development. Landing a position at the creative childrens' game studio Humongous Entertainment (now Infogrames Kids), he added sound, video and animation work to his growing portfolio of expertise. Shawn can be found in the credits for such games as:

• Blue's Clues: Blue's Birthday Adventure,
• Blue's Clues: Blue's 123 Time Activities,
• Blue's Clues: Blue's Treasure Hunt,
• Pajama Sam: You Are What You Eat, From Your Head To Your Feet,
• Blue's Clues: Blue's Reading Time Activities, and
• Blue's Clues: Blue's Art Time Activities.

While at Humongous Entertainment, Shawn started moving in the direction of systems and utility programming by working on tools and utilities that were used in the development of game titles. He took ownership of the in-house sound effects browser, wrote various tutorials, tips and macros for the integrated development environment; Codewright, and was an active member of the company's coding standards group. As the dot-com landscape started to crumble, and shortly after Humongous Entertainment was gobbled up by a global media giant, Shawn was one of fifteen who were let go in a finacial effort to boost the bottom line for stock holders before the end of the fiscal year.

Within a week, Shawn had found a new home at Isomedia as a programmer/consultant. Here he added expertise in various server-side (ASP, PHP, Cold Fusion) and server (IIS, Apache) technologies to his toolkit as well as enhancing his already considerable Visual Basic skills. After a year Isomedia, too, had to release him as the client growth he was hired to meet never managed to materialize.

A month later Shawn was placed in a contract position as an expert in Linux, MySQL and Apache for a young company who had just acquired an existing set of customer database and web servers. Here Shawn further solidified his Linux, server, Perl and PHP experience while adding DNS, RAID, VPNs, Firewalls, wireless communicatins and data centers to the mix. Being a small company, he also provided input into marketing, visual design and TV commercials.

But it was not to last. In the Spring of 2002 the floundering economy finally caught up with Shawn and his contract was cancelled due to lack of funds. After three months of searching, with no real leads, Shawn eventually decided to take advantage of the downtime and return to school to obtain his Microsoft Certified Professional certification and an Associates Degree in Internet Application Development.

MCP now firmly in hand, Shawn is currently in his degree program, where he is studying Java, .NET, Javascript, Style Sheets and graphic design. In addition to his schoolwork, Shawn is also studying for the newly available Security+ certification, continues to dabble in game development, manages a home network of six computers and mentors fellow students.