About

Greetings, my name is Jared.

Just some background info:

School: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Major: Advertising (College of Media)
Minor: Computer Science (College of Engineering)

Graduation: 2010… assuming I don’t drop out before then to do a startup and take over the world 😉

My portfolio: Phunctional Design
Latest side project: Hacker News Directory (find hackers at your school)
Follow me on Twitter or Hacker News

I recommend Linode and Github for your startup–they offer better packages than Slicehost, and they’re more affordable.

What I’m doing now

I am interning with Illinois Ventures, I’m working with One Llama, I’m maintaining Hacker News Directory, I consult under Phunctional Design on various projects, and I’m involved in a project with a few friends (to be announced soon).  Clearly, I have not yet mastered the art of “focusing.”

Coding/Projects
I’ll use whatever gets the job done, but lately I’ve been a fan of PHP (Code Igniter) and jQuery.  I use Java a lot at school, although don’t prefer it.

I’m using Ruby on Rails on a current project, but prefer PHP for smaller projects.  I’m also doing some iPhone development using Objective-C.  Above all, I love designing.

I’ve also worked in Flex and Flash (AS3).  The Sound Object memory leak is a royal pain, I hope it gets fixed soon!

Design/UI
I guess I would be more of the Chad Hurley than the Steve Chen.  I can quote silly (but true) things like “you lose almost 50% of your audience with every click.”  I also know that most people will judge your website based on its appearance in 500 milliseconds.  Most people use their gut feeling, which turns out to be one of the best methods for judging something.