My name is Jonathan Bravata, and I am a web developer originally from Chicago, now residing in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I have done work for companies like PetSmart, Maxell USA, TD Ameritrade and Liberty Mutual Insurance. My work includes extensive experience in PHP, Ruby on Rails and C#.Net. I have a lot of experience with frameworks like jQuery as well as web services from companies like Twilio, Facebook and YouTube. Unfortunately, I am not much of a designer but can certainly bring the work of those more talented than I in this area to life.
I love programming, bringing a website to life to solve a problem or automate a task and spend far too much time seeing something cool and saying "I could do that!" without any particular use or plan for it. I am also a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs and baseball in general, and enjoy a good movie, a good book and a good video game. Oh yeah, and I am crazy about my black labrador Abby. I try my best to keep up with the latest in technology and frequent websites like Ars Technica to keep abreast of technological changes.
I would like to think that I am organized and expressive as well as being a strong communicator, particularly in writing. At the same time, I can be shy around people I do not know well and tend toward self-deprecation and downplaying myself.
I attended Middle Tennessee State University for one year, studying Computer Science, and a couple more at Illinois State University majoring in Telecommunications Management. Ultimately, however, I did not finish; I absolutely love to learn and am largely self-taught, but do not enjoy the formality of the educational system. It simply does not feel as though it is created for the benefit of students, but rather the benefit of the schools themselves and the system in general.
The Seventh Gate is my personal website. It is named after the final book of a fantasy series called The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (authors of many of the legendary Dragonlance books). Conceptaully, the Seventh Gate was a place of great power where gifted magi gathered to sunder the world. It serves as a central jumping off point for a lot of my daily Internet activity in a similar way.
The site serves as my personal homepage, aggregating some of the websites I enjoy reading and keeping an eye on the weather nearby and where some of my best friends reside.
If you want to check out my resume, you can do so here. You can contact me at jon at element-labs.com. I also encourage you to visit the webpage of Element Labs, the company I started under which I do much of my work.