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My name is Jeremy Heminger and I am a Systems and Web Applications Developer living in Wildomar California, USA. I suppose I was born into the tech industry. My father was a computer engineer for I.B.M. and later worked for NASA in Houston, Texas where I was born and raised. Well actually if you want to get technical I was born in Webster, Texas and grew up in League City, Texas which is about 5 miles from the Johnson Space Center. My mother always said the area was a bit more, "California", than Texas because of all the transplants brought in for the Space Program. Anyways, I was presented with my first computer when I was 6 years old. A brand new Commodore VIC 20. I spent a few days reviewing the manual and understood the concept of programming rather quickly. I was able modify existing source code and even write simple programs of my own. Before long I was creating line drawings, ASCII animations and even simple word games. My day care center had a Commodore PET and one day I sat down, entered in some code and caused an ASCII bird to fly around the screen. Immediately I was stamped with the label of, "computer programmer", and labeled a, "genius". ~ "Remember this was the 1980's and anyone who had any knowledge of computers was like an alchemist to many people."
To tell you the truth, I hated the idea and decided that I wanted to be an artist...Which of course, angered my father to no end.
So, for the next 15 years or so I bummed around, skateboarded, surfed, partied and generally slacked off.
The 60's counter-culture movement was in revival in the 1990's and I was fully invested. Once my father asked me, "what are you going to do in 10 years? How will you survive?" Appropriately, so I thought at the the time, I quoted the Grateful Dead, "I ... will ... get by".
I did, "get by", in the strictest sense. I lived in some of the not so nice parts of the greater Houston area and heard more than a few gun shots at night,...saw a few things.
Sometime in the early 2000's the World Wide Web bubble exploded and my father, now a business owner for a company that repaired and sold equipment for the process control market needed a website. He remembered that I had an interest in computers once upon a time and asked me if I would be interested in building him a website. I had again gotten the tech bug and said that sure, I will give it a go and so I began reading up on HTML.
It didn't take long for me to realize that HTML was static and that what my father needed was a catalog. HTML wouldn't be able to fit his needs and so I began to study ASP VBSCRIPT. In the end I built him a web catalog of over 1000 products with a homepage built in Macromedia Flash.
Over the next few years I maintained and updated the website, built various smaller projects including 3D modeling, installation and specification manuals, Flash animations and such.
My father retired in the mid 2000's and I had no interest in taking over the business. The equipment his company repaired in many cases were built in the 1970's and PC's were taking over the market. There really wouldn't have been a business for much longer, so I moved to California following my mother, some of my other relatives and of course the industry.
California was not what I expected. My grandparents were the first to move here and for some reason they decided to move to Murrieta. The people there are politically quite a bit more conservative than my political leanings. I am still quite surprised actually at how conservative the outlying areas of California can be. But hey, its America..."takes all kinds".
For the first 3 years in California I didn't work in web development. I wasn't sure if I was qualified..."I am pretty sure I wasn't". So, I got a regular job and went back to school. Eventually I decided to go back and have been steadily employed ever since..."knock on wood".
As I am finding is the norm in the tech industry, I have worked in several places and worn many different hats. I am less a, "jack of all trades, master of none"...and more of a "master of all trades". Most of the small businesses I have worked for don't have the budget for a, "team", as it were. So, I have been forced to learn every aspect of my field in order to compete.
One thing my employers would say consistently is that if I groan and act like things aren't going well and that the task seems like it won't be complete..."then its probably just about finished". ... I can figure out how to do just about anything.
Something I always say to customers when they ask if something can be done, "if you've seen it somewhere else on the web, then it can be done, and I will figure it out".
From 2015 - 2017 I lived in Redlands. Its a great little college town. Art festivals, music, theater, there is always something going on. Its a bit far from the ocean, but the mountains are right there. At the time I am writing this its 80 degrees but I can see snow on the mountains. And, that snow is only a short drive away....It's nice.
I currently live in Wildomar California. I am available for hire so, if you have a project. Please feel free to contact me.
Tags: Heminger Family