Jason Leveille's Blog

I enjoy hearing about the paths people have taken on the journey to their current job.  Many people seem to find themselves with a job they previously never would have envisioned holding.  As little as 6 years ago I could not have imagined having a career in Web Development.  Here is how I got here…

High School

I went to High School in Northern Penobscot County, in Howland, Maine.  At Penobscot Valley High School, home of the Howlers, I was very focused on athletics.  During this time I was only vaguely familiar with the home row keys on the keyboard, but I was very familiar with hard work.  My work ethic would later pay its dividends when I discovered how much I enjoyed topics in Web Design and Development.

College

In 1994 I attended Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, Maine, in their Merchant Marine and Power Plant Engineering programs.  At MMA I took 1 computer class, where I remember feeling completely overwhelmed.  After 1 year I transfered to Thomas College in Waterville, Maine, where I entered the Math/Computer Information Teacher Education program.  This meant that upon graduation I would be certified to teach both Math and Computer courses.  I shouldn’t have been certified to teach computer courses (sorry Thomas).  The program was young and lacked clear direction (or it lacked a clear vision for what kind of computer courses we should be taking).  To illustrate this, I remember how excited I was during student teaching when some 6th grader showed me how to make a watermark in MS Word.  I showed my good friend and roommate Chad Boyd (who is now a lead Database Engineer for Microsoft).  He thought I was a complete moron.  Fortunately, I had a good work ethic and a genuine interest in teaching computers, and I didn’t stay a complete moron forever.

The Working World - Teaching

I was a High School teacher for 8 years, and I loved the work. My first 2 years of teaching were at Poland Regional High School in Poland Spring, Maine.  My last 6 were at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, Maryland.  Towards the end of that 8 years I increasingly found myself looking forward to my time without students so that I could work on web design and development. I would use my planning periods to read blogs/books and work on projects.  Each day I tried to learn something new.  There was a period of almost 2 years where all I thought about was CSS and XHTML.  I wanted to be a better web developer.  During my last 6 months of teaching I started to feel that I wasn’t being fair to my students.  My attention was elsewhere.  So, I stopped teaching in 2007.

The Working World - Web Development Fulltime

Even though I’m doing development work fulltime now, my excitement for what I’m doing/learning hasn’t stopped.  I look forward to learning something new every day (no matter how trivial), and I look forward to reading what is happening in the world in which I work.  At any given time I am (trying to) reading 3 or 4 books and working on multiple projects.  I will also be graduating in May with a Masters Degree in Computer Science.  Unfortunately I don’t get nearly enough time to write or share all the things I’m working on.  I hope that changes in the future.

Last Thoughts

I really enjoyed writing this blog post.  I rarely ever think about high scool and college.  Both those worlds seem so far away that I feel like I’m seeing them through Coke bottle glasses when my attention does turn their way.  Now that I have thought about them, it reminds me how much I miss: spending so much time with my family; training with my brothers for whatever season was coming up; skiing at Sugarloaf and Sunday River; playing baseball; playing soccer; standing in front of a classroom; all the great people I’ve been fortunate enough to know along my path; etc.

For a long time in my life (> 15 years) I was very focused on athletics and exercise.  My hobbies included my bike and my running shoes.  About 5 years ago that focus shifted to computers, and now my hobbies include my books and my source code.  I hope to one day find a calm balance between the two.  I could surely use the excercise, and I’m almost certain finding that balance would make me a better developer.  Perhaps after graduate school … or perhaps after my kids grow a little older … or perhaps when all the browsers “in the world join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace“.

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