Hi there! You’ve apparently come here to learn a little bit about me and my site; well, you’ve come to the right place.
About John Crean
Please allow me to introduce myself: I’m John Crean, and this is my website. I was born and raised in Southern California – San Diego to be exact – and I still call it home. My parents, Mike and Pat, had two kids before me, making me the youngest of three kids, I have a brother Michael (the oldest), and a sister Mary (the middle child). Our family wasn’t much different than your typical suburban household (stable and loving), and the family continues to function the same way even today.
My interest in computers began as far back as I could remember, playing games on our Commodore 64. We got our first PC in 1990: a 386SX33. Like the Commodore 64 before it, I mostly just used it as a gaming machine (what do you expect, I was only 7 at the time). In the summer of 1996, we upgraded and got a brand new Pentium I 120Mhz PC running Windows 95; that’s when things really began to take off for me. I spent hours upon hours on that computer, learning the ins and outs of Windows 95 and downloading shareware programs off of AOL.
It wasn’t long after we got that computer that I began to get into the Web. I was in 8th grade, and a friend of mine fired of Notepad and typed in some random codes and saved it. He opened it up in Netscape and I was blown away with just how easy it was to create a webpage. I went home that night and started to play around and reverse engineer the source code of other web pages to learn things. I signed up for a GeoCities account and started just putting up photos of my interests: airplanes, baseball, football, etc. There wasn’t much there at all other than a few pictures and random text.
From there I just kept tinkering and learning HTML and how to create graphics. My website grew and evolved, as did my skills. In the fall of 1997, I went into Mt Carmel High School as a freshman. I played trumpet in the marching band there (yes, I was a band geek, and proud of it!) The band had quite an impressive website, and I found out the webmaster, Jason San Jose, was also a trumpet player. That winter, we bought our first flatbed color scanner and I started scanning all my photos. I realized I should send all the photos that I had scanned to Jason so he could post them to the website.
Not long after I started sending Jason the photos, he offered me the position of maintaining all the media on the website; I eagerly accepted. The job quickly grew and I was scanning and uploading photos as quickly as I could. Other band members were emailing me their photos for posting. The band website at the time was just a collection of static HTML pages, so I had to build all the photo galleries by hand, quite the tedious task, but it gave me the opportunity to quickly learn more about web pages and foster my interest in computer programming.
Not six months after I began working on the band website, Jason sent me an email asking if it was okay if he gave my contact information to a band parent who was looking to hire someone for the summer to just make some updates to their company websites; I agreed. So I went in for my interview, and got the job; I was ecstatic! I started in June of 1998 at SPARTA, Inc and much like with the band website, it was just simple HTML updates.
During that summer though, I proved my worth and was able to get hired on permanently at the end of the summer. I have now been at SPARTA for nearly 11 years. It was my first, and continues to be my only, job. My position at SPARTA has grown, and I have been able to grow with it. Oh and that band parent that got in contact with me? He turned out to be my boss for ten-and-a-half years before he moved on. Not many people have the ability to say they entered their career field as a freshman in high school, but I count myself as one of the lucky ones.
After graduating high school, I went to the local community college for a few years before transferring to the University of California, San Diego. I just recently completed my Bachelors Degree in Computer Science; with my field of study primarily focused on software development.
I’m still here at SPARTA, continuing primarily on web programming, and I love just about every day of it. I look back at my humble beginnings and compare them to some of the large-scale projects I have completed here at SPARTA, and it amazes me not only how much the internet and technology has changed, but also how I’ve been able to stay in the thick of it and grow. I think that’s what makes what I do so interesting to me, the fact that it’s constantly changing and evolving. My simple skills of HTML have given way to ASP, Perl, ColdFusion, PHP and Java web development. I have created, or been part of a team that has created, many full-scale web applications.
I still live in San Diego, in a condo with my girlfriend Jess. We have a cat, Bailey, who happens to also think she’s a dog (seriously, she’ll play fetch). I only live about 5 minutes away from my parents, so I’ve stayed very close to where I grew up. My brother and sister-in-law live about 20 minutes away with their 2 kids, so I get to see them fairly often. My sister decided she was too cool for San Diego and bolted for Northern California right after graduating high school. She lives in Sacramento now with her husband and thier daughter.
So there’s a little bit about my background. It may seem like I focused primarily on my professional life and web development, but that’s because that is my life.
About creanium.net
Obviously, creanium.net is my home on the web. In the past, I used to just think blogging was nothing more than writing up, “here’s what I did today” and treating it like a journal. In the beginning of the blogging revolution, that’s really all blogs were. But as the noise quieted down, bloggers began to find their voice and were rising to the levels of newspaper writers and being taken seriously.
I’m still searching for my voice, but I believe I’ve been able to narrow it down. Most my articles feature my thoughts and opinions on the web, and technology in general. Family is also a big part of my life, so many articles will be about my life and my family; it’s what makes this my website.
So please, take a look around, and do not hesitate to contact me if you feel the need; you certainly have your options.
