Sam Goin, Bakersfield Web Designer and Programmer
Backstory...
Sam Goin graduated from Highland High School in 1992. He worked at various jobs while attending a
local college until he joined the U.S. Coast Guard in 1994. During his military stint, he was
introduced to the Internet and immediately fell in love. By the time he finished his four year tour,
he already had a job waiting for him back in Bakersfield as a Web designer.
Education...
Sam has several years at various colleges across the nation, including BC and CSUB, but as yet... no degree.
He is a self-taught designer and programmer, as are many who started when the Internet was in its "Wild West" days and any
design courses were way behind the curve. At that time, if you wanted to learn, you did it on your own.
Work Experience and Learning Progression...
Sam learned HTML when it was still in its 2.0 infancy. He began by hand coding, and still a hand-coder today.
When the local ISP he worked for needed an ISP billing system that actually functioned properly, Sam took the initiative
and built his first PHP (Built in PHP 2.0) application: a full scale ISP billing application, fully integrated with the Unix FreeBSD operating system
controlling customer accounts. In the process, he learned much about Unix/Linux and MySQL.
After that beast was tamed, he built a fully functional WebMail that was used by all of the ISP's customers. This was created before
Hotmail became popular. The development of this application gained him an in-depth knowledge of the SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 protocols.
Again, this was fully integrated with the ISP's Unix servers. He also built an online knowledge base used by the tech support team.
Sam's next job as CTO of The Marcom Group (a local, award winning marketing and communication company) enabled him to learn even more
about Linux, Apache, Sendmail, Qmail, SpamAssassin as he organized the company's foray into hosting the websites that they had been
creating. At this busy design shop, Sam had the pleasure to be immersed in a production environment where the word "Go" was something somebody
else said, because you were already off the starting blocks and developing the next project. After a personal loss, Sam decided he needed
a change of pace. With the blessing of the owner of TMG, Sam accepted a managerial position with a new company. The owner of The Marcom Group
and Sam are still good friends to this day.
Sam accepted a job as general manager of his old ISP and left the design field. During this job, he was able to learn more about the
internal workings of an ISP, broadband, tech support, networking, and cabling. He was able to exercise the managerial part of his brain
while learning more about the "other side of the computer industry" -- that being "help desk support" and networking.
In 2006, Sam accepted a position as CTO for a startup company named My Realty Data, Inc. He built a robust online software suite for
real estate investors. While the suite handled everything from lead acquisition to tracking the entire escrow process and profit/loss, and it was
extremely popular with older investors who knew the ins and outs of the business, the bottom of the real estate market bottomed out,
causing the fragile new company to go out of business.
Sam's latest, and most complex application is an online social networking site. It utilizes Ajax, Javascript, DHTML, CSS, Video Upload and Compression,
Image Upload and Manipulation, on-the-fly image creation, merchant account integration, and of course MySQL. It is over 400,000 lines of code long.
