The Personal and Professional Internet Presence of Morgan T. Doocy

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1 Introduction

1.1 About the Author

Goals & Professional Philosophy

Everything I do — in work or IRL — is rooted in a deep passion for enriching others’‎ lives. That usually takes the form of great code, great User Experience Design, and just trying to be an awesome person.

Like a lot of geeks, most of my professional knowledge is self-taught. I have an almost unquenchable thirst for new and awesome languages, paradigms, ideas, and just general knowledge.

The way I see it, the fundamental nature of life experience boils down to this: the more things you learn about, the more insight you gain into things you already know — or thought you knew. If there’s anything my profession has taught me, it’s that there’s so much that you don’t know you don’t know.

Interests & Focus

My first passion in webdev was Usability, back in the day of Jakob Nielsen. I’m a fervent advocate of rich, seamless, intuitive user experiences, and I recognize that the larger the audience, the greater the impact of a site’s usability on its bottom line. I’m not afraid to put in that 80% of the effort for 20% of the design (even sometimes more like 90%/10%), when it results in a more elegant solution.

This grew into my second passion: developing high-quality front-end implementations of awesome designs. Great CSS and JavaScript/​DOM/​Ajax/​HTML5 interactivity are my bread and butter. I also love incorporating accessibility features — which I extend beyond the “disabled access” connotation to mean “enabling the consumption of your information through as many avenues as possible,” encompassing things like Semantic Web metadata and Responsive Web Design (for a single, scalable site viewable on a wide range of screen sizes). I occasionally enjoy light graphic design, but my primary focus is on interaction design and implementation; I like to leave graphics to the pros.

After this I developed a passion for backend development — web services & data exchange, database design, CMSes, Web Application Frameworks, as well as large and small roll-your-own solutions. MVC FTW!1

My next challenge will be merging my loves of language and computer science in the field of Computational Linguistics. I’m super excited about the future of NLP, semantic and syntactic language processing, knowledge representation, semantic networks, pattern recognition/​machine learning, and theoretical linguistics and its computational applications. I’m eager to learn more about this ASAP.

I’m always excited about any project that allows me to apply these skills and learn new ones.

1 Back in the day, when I was first getting into server-side development, I inherited some terribly convoluted code from another developer that needed some serious factorization. After spending many long hours revising, revising, and revising some more, what I ended up with was essentially an object-oriented MVC pattern in my own custom Web Application Framework — i.e., with object-oriented, inheritance-based tag-generation functions — before I knew such things existed (and before there were mature open-source PHP implementations anyhow). Looking back on this later, I was pretty chuffed.

That’s the awesome thing about MVC: is it’s nothing more than the natural outcome of factorization of designs which make heavy use of underlying data in multiple UIs.