Corin Nguyen

About Me

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

C# development is just what I do to make a living.

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 IT. 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 ended up moving to 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.