Originally from North Carolina, Charlie was raised and educated in Atlanta, where he developed a taste for Chick Fil-A biscuits, fast German cars and southern blondes. He is a phenomenally talented driver, having perfected his dogfighting technique over years on the 75/85 connector. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Emory University in 1999 with a degree in English and Creative Writing and moved to Athens soon afterward, working for several years as Project Manager for a large web development company catering to financial institutions.
Charlie came to Plexus with a high level understanding of web development and project management but had an acute interest in learning about and working in the application development life cycle. Charlie successfully completed the Plexus Apprenticeship program within 6 months. This is a rigorous training program where developers are immersed in learning to build standards compliant and section 508 compliant HTML and CSS code, Ruby on Rails Framework and Rapid Prototyping methodologies, jQuery, Javascript, and MySQL. Charlie has been with Plexus for over three years and now heads a three person development team.
Charlie earned a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Georgia in 2007. While earning his degree, he designed and constructed several mountain bike trails in the Atlanta and Athens area. If you have ever been to Oconee Heritage Park, you have seen his work. He also raced on the Sunshine Cycles / Mean Bean Mountain Bike Racing Team during this time and served as a chapter president of the Southern Off-Road Bicycling Association. He has twice conquered the mighty Off-Road Assault on Mount Mitchell, an all-day, 56-mile, 13,000 vertical foot mountain bike race which most who start hope simply to finish.
Charlie grew up on golf courses and can probably beat you in a match unless you have a single-digit handicap. In December of 2007, he got his first hole-in-one at the 165-yard 3rd at Lane Creek. He hopes to build his own private golf course one day (having already designed several that never got built).
Charlie lives in a hundred-year old house which he is in the slow process of renovating, rides a vintage BMW motorcycle, and has for a sidekick a 120-pound German Shepherd named Kobi that can probably also beat you at golf (you need to get to the range, kid). In what little free time is left over after bikes, golf, and work, he is an avid sleeper. He has yet to write the great American novel.
APR
30
Fighting comment spam in Rails with Akismet and Defensio
A lot of the sites Plexus builds have a built-in blog component which allows for user comments. As with any front-end form, these can attract a lot of spam, primarily of th...
MAR
16
Dynamic Select Menus in Rails using Observe_Field
I frequently find myself building forms which contain dynamic select menus. This means that a user selects a choice from one menu, and that choice populates options into a ...
DEC
18
Web Site vs. Web Application... What's the Difference?
When people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I develop web applications, they often give me a blank look. When that happens, I backtrack, generalize, and tell ...
OCT
22
How the Worst Camera on the Market Became the Most Popular Camera on the Web
This August, Mark Milian of the LA Times reported that Apple's iPhone had surpassed the Canon Rebel XTi as the most popular camera on Flickr. Let's distill that down to its...
MAR
30
Carbon Motors Getting More Press
One of Plexus' clients, Carbon Motors Corp., has been getting a lot of attention from the media lately. I was the lead developer on their web site, and thus feel I have a l...
Plexus builds custom, rich internet applications on the Ruby on Rails web application framework.
Plexus provides ProductCart Shopping Cart for e-commerce web sites.
