So it goes…

The Legend of Fred LeBlanc

The Early Years

Fred started his Internet-related career in the spring of 1996, creating a horribly coded website on one of America Online’s member pages. Although this first attempt was merely filling in an online template, his disgusting results spurned him to break out of the limitations of the disgraceful AOL templates.

In the fall of 1996, Fred purchased a box called the “Complete Website Construction Kit” from some computer store. Inside was a WYSIWYG-style website design program and a book called “Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.2 in a Week” by Laura Lemay.

Fred read the book cover-to-cover, the WYSIWYG software never saw the light of day.

Getting Serious

He purchased his first domain name in 1999, and just one year later, Fred headed off to Denver, Colorado to attend college for multimedia and web design. It was here that he learned about CSS, and through multiple versions of his personal website that ran through 2002, Fred’s HTML knowledge ramped up from nothing to respectable.

Fred purchased his second domain name in December, 2001. It was around this time that he also picked up his first PHP book. He had grown tired of static websites — having to copy and paste everywhere. Duplicated data was driving him nuts. This second domain name was for a site called Concentricus, a webzine that Fred not only would build four times over, but for which he wrote for as well.

In 2002, Fred moved back to New England to finish his college career. He learned things like JavaScript, more PHP, MySQL and better HTML practices. Fred graduated with a 4.0 cumulative GPA (although let’s be realistic, it was an art school).

While winding down his senior year, Fred applied for a job at iMarc in beautiful Newburyport, Massachusetts. After nailing both of his interviews, he was offered a job as a PHP developer.