Who is this ‘Matt’ guy, anyway?

I came into this world on Thursday, May 1, 1980. Since then I’ve spent a significant amount of time playing music, listening to music, playing video games, watching movies, skateboarding, loving my wife Deanna, eldest daughter Hannah, baby Addison, two kitties and family, and trying to make the best of my time on this planet. Oh! …and I’ve been known to design the odd website from time-to-time.

Locale

For the most part, I’ve lived in Whitby, Ontario (Canada), which is about 45 minutes East of Toronto. Currently, I’m just one town over in Oshawa.

“When I’ve got the music, I’ve got a place to go”

I rocked drums for a ska-punk band called Lucky Number Seven from 1997-2002. I was, and still am super tight with the other guys in the band. LNS is responsible for some of my favourite memories and I met so many great people playing shows. I truly miss it.

“Yeah! Wooo! Bring it on, sucka! This is my kinda shit!”

I’m pretty big into gaming these days. PC used to be my platform of choice, but I simply couldn’t keep up with the constant upgrades and grew tired of spending more time tweaking settings than actually playing the games. A couple months after its release, I picked up an Xbox 360 and never looked back. I also have a PlayStation 3 and a Wii, but spend most of my gaming time on my Xbox 360.

Job History

I started a one-man web business in May of 2000, shortly after deciding College wasn’t for me. A month later, I landed a job at ‘The Nation’s Music Station‘ MuchMusic. For 2 years I co-hosted a weekly internet/tech/culture show. I was later bumped up in the ranks to a senior position and continued to work in the Queen St. window until July of 2005. When I left Much, I realized how much of my life I’ve worked away over the past few years and decided to shut Media Press down in order to dedicate more time to my family and my gaming habit.

Mid-July 2005, I moved on and joined the Participatory Culture Foundation where I spent approximately 8 months managing their many sites and working on the Democracy Internet TV Platform.

From March 2006 – June 2007 I was a lone soldier in the battle of freelance web design. In that time, I churned out approximately 20 top notch designs. Some of which were full blown websites/blogs, others simply the front end. I had a great run, worked with a lot of awesome people and really enjoyed working for and by myself.

Just over a year of flying solo was exhausting, both mentally and physically. I was presented with a fantastic offer to be a part of a great team of designers and developers and I took it. From March 2007 to March 2008 I filled the position of Lead Web Developer at Graphics.net.

Currently…

For whatever reason, I seem to make career changes in March. For the third straight year, my path changed in March, which lead me back to the freelance world. I had been planning to go back to freelance later in ’08, but things lined up out of nowhere and I found myself no longer being micro-managed much sooner than I expected.

This time around, I’m making a point to learn from my past mistakes. I’m already doing just about everything differently – except the cranking out awesome designs part… I’m still doing that! Speaking of which, head over to my portfolio to check out some of my past work. Or get in touch if you’d like to hire me for a project.

I have a few new directions I’m planning to take my blog and my work over the next few months that I’m very excited about. So be sure to subscribe to my feed.