My work is revolving around web technologies. I started enjoying them considerably soon – in the beginning of the year 1995. When I discovered how easy and satysfiyng for me is creating web pages, I decided to create one.
The closest organization was the school where I was studying at the time. I was a 1st year student at the Faculty of Management, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia. During the summer break I established first WWW server for our faculty from limited gopher presence faculty had. We were one of the first educational organizations in Slovakia to have our own web page. There were almost no commercial web sites in Slovakia back then. Look at the FM UK's first web site ever! Hey, it's cutting edge for 1995. ;)
Soon my work was recognized and people from IBM Slovakia asked me to maintain their web site. There begun my work relationship with IBM which lasted more than 3 years and I learned from it a lot. It was a little bit different experience than working for school, since IBM is a worldwide corporation and they have strong guidelines for everything. I learned there how important communication is in companies. In IBM it is essential.
Next big project I worked on in 1996 was a web site for the Slovak Technical University. They've redesigned since. At the same time with my good friend Lerby we designed a site for Computer Center of STU - that's where we were working. It is a part of bigger site (virtual site) called Bratislava Trade Site. That still looks like how it looked when we created it.
I consulted for more companies, some of them are: Slovnaft, a.s. (Slovak biggest oil producing company - I developed part of their Intranet and trained people who would supply data to it later on); 3P - Pauer is my schoolmate who has his own company - I did his first website, now he replaced it and is maintaining it by himself. KIO.SK was a company where I worked in the summer and autumn 1996, here I was at my first office at a commercial institution.
I also did some training in Internet technologies. First one was for the employees of Slovnaft - I thaught them how to update all the information they were providing to their Intranet. Then I had a lecture at the Weekend Masters of Business Administration Program in Slovakia. I taught in english language, even though my experiences with spoken english were not vast, just from school. My other big assignment was for company NETAX who hired me to be their lecturer. I did trainings for about 40 employees of the Slovak Ministry (Department) of Telecommunications.
When I first came to US I worked for Tumble Interactive Media, Inc. located in TriBeCa, NYC. I started as a producer, but soon I became the Director of Web Services. We developed sites for Information Architects (alydaar.com no longer exists) and Romantic Times Magazine when I was there. I maintained sites for New York Sports Clubs, W.P. Carey, Carey Diversified, Big Brothers Big Sisters NY, Hearst Corporate, Wilhelmina Models, Backtrax, Bentley Associates and ABC Intranet.
After Tumble I shortly switched to the consulting company called Intellimark. My first assignment was to design an Intranet site for Philip Morris Companies, Inc. It was very challenging and interesting project, my first corporate experience in US (what a great introduction to US corporate world!). Next I worked for Bowne, Inc. where I was a part of Intranet development team. Several other consulting positions at this time were with JP Morgan - their Cignify spinoff working on cool portfolio valuation application, and short consulting job with Xceed to help with website for Casual Corner clothing company.
Then came the era of dot com boom. Albert and I had our own company called Synchronized Dynamics, Inc. We offered web development services specializing in the technology solutions - applications architecture, database, back-end and front-end programming. During our high time we were employing 10 people, 5 of them working from our location in Astoria. After the recession began in the IT industry we have started to aim our efforts at consulting - placing people in client's companies. Among our clients were: IBM, UBS PaineWebber, Deutche Bank, Bredin Business Information, NYU School of Medicine.
In 2002 I have started consulting for IBM. My first assignment was to work on IBM content management standards, which included DTDs, XSL, and XML taxonomies development. I have also architected and helped develop content management implementation on Interwoven TeamSite. After a year and a half, I switched from consultant to IBM employee, soon after that took on team lead responsibilities for applications development team within ibm.com. My team works on variety of applications - from Domino, through PHP, perl to Java. I am also trying to become certified IT architect.