Corin Nguyen

About Me

I'm a husband, father, writer and an entrepreneur -- in that order.

C# development is what I do to pay the mortgage.

Professional Background

I'm completely self-taught and very driven. That's a good combination in the tech industry.

I picked up a book on HTML in 1996. I designed my one and only "about me" website in 1996. A friend saw my site and liked it, and she referred me to her mom who needed a site for her home business. I was paid $200. The site was terrible.

In 1997, I started reading design books on color theory, typography and layout. I dumped my "about me" site and created a site called Swing Colorado during the height of the swing dancing craze here in Denver.

At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant at USWEST (which later became Qwest). However, my website caught the eye of the head of IT at USWEST division that I was employed. He wanted me to design their intranet sites and I negotiated some time from my regular duties to help out the IT department. That was the start of my design portfolio.

In 1999, my portfolio was decent enough to apply to a web design company called SpireMedia. At the time, SpireMedia were a startup of five. Now they're one of the leading design firms in Denver.

Six months later, at the height of dotCom bubble, I was made an offer I couldn't refuse and left SpireMedia to become the lead designer for a dotCom company called WebFamilies which quickly failed when the bubble burst. The best thing about the job was they sent me to a ColdFusion course and that started my love of programming.

After the bubble I went to a company called O2 Group in 2001, where I basically started over as a coder to gain experience as a programmer. I learned ASP and PHP as well as improving my HTML, CSS and javascript skills.

I spent 4 years at O2 Group sharpening my skills. In my spare time, I created World Short Track as a way to merge my design and ASP skills. With the approval of my manager, I was allowed to continue freelancing for friends and family in order to continue honing my design skills.

O2 Group was sold in 2005 and I was hired at my current company, a medium-sized entertainment company. I started out doing ASP programming for their web site. At the onset, they told me that they were converting the site to C# and .NET. I learned C# was put in charge of updating their website Content Management System.

I currently do C# and AJAX development for an application used by the customer service team. I've been programming in C# for 2 years now and I'm starting to get pretty good at it.

The important thing to know about me

I love dancing and still go once a week and have been doing so since I was 21.