About Clint Ecker
Hey there! My name is Clint Ecker. I’m a web developer living in Wicker Park, Chicago in the United States. I grew up in Kansas and through a series of travels through Indiana and Ohio, I’ve ended up in what I consider to be one of the best cities in the world.
My Jobs
I am currently employed as a project manager, web developer, and contributing writer at Condé Nast owned Ars Technica, one of the largest and most highly-regarded publications dealing with technology, law & policy, and many other areas.
On top of the development and project management work I do for Ars, I’ve also served in the capacity of writer, then editor, then writer again, and finally as correspondant for a number of technology-related events and conferences. For over a year I served as head of content development for Journals.ars as well as primary journalist for Infinite Loop, perhaps the most well-respected source of Apple news and analysis on the web.
In more recent times, I’ve contributed preeminent reviews of Apple hardware such as the Mac Mini, Apple TV, Airport Extreme, iPod video, iPod Classic, original iPod nano, iPhone, and MacBook. I’ve also served as correspondant covering events like Apple’s WorldWide Developer’s Conference, TechCrunch40, Macworld, and more.
My previous job was at outstanding advertising agency, Stone Ward, as their senior web developer. The company was founded and is based in Little Rock, Arkansas with interactive offices located in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.
My Education
The five years I spent attending Purdue University were to obtain a degree in Computer Engineering, but had the side-effect of pushing me into a career of web development—which, as it turns out, I enjoy quite a bit. I am most interested in creating web applications, but feel strongly about producing semantic markup, adopting new ideas & trends in web development, making software more social, and generally making the web a more desirable place to live out our lives.
My development (see my Github account)
Most of my projects these days are coded in a Python web development framework called Django. Django fullfills every need I have for development and has the benefits of being written in my favored programming language, having a fantastic developer community, a solid vision and goals for the project, as well as being accessible to almost every level of interactive development (design included).
I do, however dabble, and spend considerable amounts of time, working on large PHP applications and Rails 2/3 applications. I am also a huge fan of JavaScript (targeted at both the web as well as writing servers in Node.js); these days I write most of it in CoffeeScript. I’ve recently helped here and there on a private Ruby EventMachine implementation of a production IRC server which was quite fun.
In past lives I’ve worked on just about every CMS known to man, ColdFusion applications and more. I’ve dabbled OS X and iOS applications (as well as Visual Studio on Windows) and feel quite capable, but I don’t believe my calling is to be found in non-web applications.
