Building Blocks

Me

Joel Hooks
m (817) 381-4232
Email

@jhooks
I am available to work on your project. Let's talk about it.

What I do
Until recently crashing cars, trucks, planes, and trains was my primary occupation. These days I spend my time developing front end clients for enterprise applications. My free time is occupied with fairly constant study in the areas of Objective-C, user experience, and interface design.

Throughout my career I've always been on the artistic/design side of application development. The programming side of the process has always fascinated me. My 'continuing education' has been focused on application architecture and development. While at SWA I was able to introduce myself to Actionscript 3 and the Flex framework. Since that time I have integrated the AS3 with the Django (Python) framework on the server side, and focused primarily on utilizing the PureMVC framework on the client side. These, coupled with Flex and AIR, have provided me with a well stocked toolbox to draw on for creating applications. One step at a time, the knowledge is slowly starting to seep in.

That is why I've titled this space 'building blocks'. It is like building a Lego set, one tiny brick at a time. If you keep building, eventually you might have something. Every now and then, you have to smash it down and start over. That's half the fun, no?

Other things
My wife Kristina and I also own a photography studio, Visual Empathy. Kristina is the primary photographer, and I am her goto nerd for business, website, and other such technical needs. We shoot weddings as a team, which is a lot of fun. Here is our photo blog of the kids, Cree, Haze, Tripp, and Cyan, as well as our various pets ( 1 dog, 1 turtle, 5 cats, and 3 poison dart frogs ). One of the fringe benefits of a photography business!