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Welcome to My Portfolio Site

I recently launched this site as of Aug. 4th 2009 so I am still working out the design so just bare with me.  Enjoy.

Biography

My name is Dan Alvare. I am a web designer/developer currently living in Mount Holly, NJ. My introduction to web design and development came in college at Philadelphia University. I originally planned to focus my career in illustration, 2D animation and motion graphics using Flash and After Effects.

I spent a few years building my skills as an animator creating cartoons, designing characters and writing scripts for my animations. I had trouble finding animation work in the area so I began to refocus my efforts toward web design. I began designing custom websites for some friends and family and became very good at the Adobe Suite and table-less HTML/CSS layouts. During this transition from design to development, I started programming in scripting languages like JavaScript and ActionScript 2.0.

After I developed some fundamental programming concepts, I became very interested in programmatically building websites and adding functionality. I naturally turned to PHP as my primary server side programming language because it is very similar ActionScript 2.0 and JavaScript. I used PHP as a scripting language at first but then quickly discovered, with the release of PHP5, that it can be an OOP language as well. I became heavily involved in programming with PHP5, Apache and MySQL and have never looked back. I have written web applications in Classic ASP, .NET VB and C# as well.

Along the way, I have learned to use jQuery which is an extremely powerful, lightweight javascript library to develop web applications in conjunction with PHP, Apache and MySQL.

I enjoy programming very much and take every opportunity to learn new technologies and concepts. I recently became heavily involved programming within the Drupal API and feel open source systems like Drupal, Joomla and Sugar CRM are going to be very essential to internet business of the future.

All of these things I've done over the years have made me into a very well rounded web application developer. I can do anything from graphic design to OOP PHP. I am a team player and am willing to help out in any way possible to create the best user experience within my applications.

Interests/Hobbies

Music, fishing, programming, building furniture, electronics, Foosball, baseball, hockey, art, motion graphics and cartoons