sunblush

I’m Stephen Tudor, a hap­pily mar­ried musi­cian and full-stack web developer.

These “about pages” are always so dull. Sorry about that.

Me? I’m a geek who’s pretty far removed from the Sil­i­con Val­ley scene and the New York bus­tle, but who finds him­self right in the thick of the web rev­o­lu­tion nonethe­less. Com­pa­nies like 37signals have proven that one can live in Podunkville and still com­pete with rock­ing prod­ucts. Thanks to the mighty Inter­nets, I may not have to move some­where with a sky-high cost of liv­ing in order to com­pete in the marketplace.

I live in pic­turesque Chester County, Penn­syl­va­nia, nes­tled among its many rolling hills, horse farms, and Star­bucks loca­tions. I went to col­lege in Philadel­phia, which is less than an hour away, but I don’t make it out to the city so much any­more now.

I’m a big fan of the Ruby pro­gram­ming lan­guage, and of the Ruby on Rails web appli­ca­tion frame­work. Web acces­si­bil­ity and usabil­ity are of huge impor­tance to me. I try to make my markup and style as sim­ple and seman­tic as pos­si­ble. I believe whole­heart­edly in the prin­ci­ple of pro­gres­sive enhance­ment, and, there­fore, not feed­ing the fat, fart­ing IE6 troll any more candy than is absolutely necessary.

Cur­rently, I’m work­ing full-time for Empa­thy Lab, a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and cre­ative web agency as a lead front-end developer.

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To scratch a dif­fer­ent cre­ative itch when I’m not work­ing, I turn to music. As a gui­tarist, bassist, and vocal­ist, I am toy­ing with the idea of a solo/collaborative record­ing project. I have played gui­tar with one band for about 6 years, and bass in another for 2 years.

I also have a pen­chant for board and card games (pri­mar­ily German-style strat­egy games). There’s a mas­sive online board game com­mu­nity site called BoardGameGeek, which is per­haps the most pop­u­lar and com­pre­hen­sive site on the hobby, and I have a pro­file there. A full list of games I own is here.

Note: In the inter­est of grow­ing my read­er­ship, I’ve decided to fork my writ­ing about games into a sep­a­rate blog, CUBE PUSHER. This should also open the door to con­tribut­ing writ­ers, which will make a world of dif­fer­ence when it’s some­one post­ing other than bor­ing old me.