About Me: Biography

Greetings!

Welcome to my little corner of the web. My name is David Dashifen Kees. I grew up in Pennsylvania where I attended school, and following my graduation, I moved to Illinois where I live now with my wife, our four cats, three snakes, two leopard geckos, two rats, and single dog. Why so many pets? She's a vet student; they seem to accumulate animals for one reason or another!

I've been involved with the Web almost as long as civilians have been able to be involved in the web. My mother works for a private university on the east coast and, as a result of her job, we were hooked into the university's network by a blazing fast 1200-baud modem (top of the line, for its time). Professionally, I've been working online for 10 years.

My area of expertise is in web application development. Essentially, this means that, when you hire me, we'll discuss your needs for a custom web application (i.e., a program that exists partially or completely online) for your web site. You and your organization, group, or family will be able to access that application from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day, any day out of the year. That's what makes online applications so great: you never have to worry about being away from your computer and not being able to access your information.

I have a "normal," 8-5 day job working for a major public university. Previously, I performed similar duties for a private university as well. These environments require a focus on security and data integrity that I bring to my consulting activities as well. When you're working with me, I'm going to do my level best to bring all of my experience to bear to make sure that your information remains available only to those people to which you provide it. Whether that's as simple as helping people choose secure, difficult to guess passwords or the purchase of SSL certificates to encrypt your data, or more complex question and answer or image based authentication schemes, I'm prepared to make sure that you feel safe using my work.

Unfortunately, much of my work requires that sort of security. As a result, my online case history is a little different from others you may have seen. Instead of showing off the wonderful graphic sites that I've worked on or the neat tricks that I've put together, I can really only talk about the tools and solutions that I've designed. Most of my clients aren't willing or are unable to provide access to the general, visiting public of Magic Hat Development for their online business practices. But, I hope that the information on this page will help you to understand the various areas in which I've worked and the flexibility that I bring to any consulting situation.

In the end, my motto is and will always be that technology is not a limiting factor. If you want it done, I can make it happen.