Vance Lucas created his first website at the age of 12 and has been focused on web development ever since. Driven to learn more about the web to make better and more interactive websites, Vance taught himself programming with PHP and MySQL back when PHP3 was new at the age of 13. Since PHP5’s release, Vance has been focused on and obsessed with object-oriented programming and the advantages it has over the traditional PHP procedural coding style. Vance created the phpDataMapper ORM library as a project to demonstrate the benefits of object-oriented code and the Standard PHP Library (SPL). Vance recently launched InvoiceMore, an invoicing web application as the flagship product of Actridge, LLC, a company that he founded in February 2009.
1999
First became interested in building webpages after seeing a friend create an AOL fan page about Zelda.
2000
[Soon]
2001
[Soon]
2002
Launched Starcraft Index (Archived Version) on it’s own domain, continued to grow it organically until it’s peak at around 2,200 unique visitors per day. Not too bad for a small gaming fansite run by a teenage webmaster with noob-like skills.
2003
Developed and released CzarNews as a PHP news script that could be included on a page anywhere it needed to go instead of taking over the page, like other scripts at the time. A word of caution before peeking at the source code – I was an amateur hack when I programmed it!
2004
PHP5 Released. Began to become interested in Object-Oriented programming methodologies.
Sold Starcraft Index on the Sitepoint Marketplace (now Flippa) to pay for new computer parts and some some college expenses. Being a poor college student sucks.
2005
[Soon]
2006
[Soon]
2007
Graduated from Oklahoma Baptist University with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management. Decided to write code for a living instead of getting some management gig somewhere.
2008
Worked at Back40 Design, Inc. as the Senior Programmer and lead the existing programming team through a complete procedural to object-oriented programming conversion for Back40’s new Content Management System called Javelin.
2009
Started a new web application development company Actridge, LLC and launched InvoiceMore, an online billing and invoicing application as the first and flagship product.
Vance currently works at OPUBCO Communications Group as a Senior PHP Programmer, and continues to grow his own business on the side.