About Stephen Loo
I'm a web application developer currently residing in Orangevale, CA. When not working, I enjoy playing the piano (self taught play-by-ear musician) or my guitar, watching movies, doing a bit of gardening, checking out the latest news and forums on the Internet. But these days most of my free time is devoted to my 4 years old son, Joshua. Being our only child, he has officially appointed me as his playmate.
My wife Susie is a stay home mom. And she is currently attending a baking school part-time, learning how to bake and decorate cakes. We've been married since 2003. She was a French major in college, and yes, she speaks French. In fact we both speak French and have both spent a number of years living in the French speaking part of Europe. (that was before we met). She is Korean, by the way, while I'm ethnically Chinese.
Professional Background
I have worked in the IT field for more than 20 years. During those years I have been involved in the different domains of the IT field, principally in users support, as a system administrator and a programmer. My current career is in web application development, involving both the front-end and the back-end web site development.
I started off using the Microsoft ASP in 2000, moving on to using PHP and MySQL, and for the past one year or so using Ruby on Rails. My first introduction to the MVC concepts was using CakePHP framework, with which I developed the iSignin website. The experience of developing iSignin also indirectly introduced me to Ruby on Rails. CakePHP was developed along a similar line as Ruby on Rails, with many of its concepts imported from ROR. That prompted me to check out ROR. Since then I am pretty much into using ROR as my development tools, while still using PHP on the side line. For me, it wasn't so much a progression of programming language but more of a progression from traditional web programming to using frameworks, be it CakePHP or ROR. I found the MVC concept rather liberating, even though it forces organization into my programming projects, which otherwise may not be all that clear cut.
I enjoy programming and have come to love web application development.
About this WebSite.
Having been in the IT field for more than 20 years, I feel that I have come to accumulate a fair amount of IT knowledge along the way. Partly because of this, I often have family and friends coming to me with their computer issues, asking for help. Lately I thought I should put all this knowledge into some sort of a simple knowledge base for other people, who can also benefit from it. Which is basically how this web site came into being. The second reason is that I enjoy writing, be it technical or blogging content. I believe developing this website will enable me to develop my writing skills, hopefully.
Since I'm into development using Ruby on Rails, you would probably think that this site is developed using ROR. Contrary to that, I actually chose to use PHP platform, in the form of the open source CMS called Drupal. My reasons for choosing this platform are quite simple. Firstly my hosting provider does not provide ROR for my hosting package. And I have been using this package for a number of years and was just too lazy to change. And hence the PHP platform. Also Drupal seems to provide a good CMS platform that meets most of my needs, without me having to develop from scratch. And I also wanted to learn Drupal, so what better way to learn it than hands-on knowledge developing a live site using it.