Christopher Paul David Johnson

I am not a personal finance blogger.  I am not really much of a blogger period.  I am a designer, a facilitator, and the guy behind the scenes here at Yakezie.  I like to think of my role here as the stage manager for a play, changing the set pieces and raising the curtain.  An important role, but never seen.  Except by the cast.

I am 24, live in San Francisco, work in Palo Alto, love photography, and have been married for a little over a year to my beautiful wife.  I was born in Idaho, but I haven’t lived there since I was 13.  I am a very typical nerd.

The context

I didn’t realize it until a few weeks ago when I started working full time at my current employer, SayNow, that I have not worked as an employee for more than six years.  Since I started college, all of the money that I make has been from temporary work (college summer jobs) or consulting, and all that time I was my own boss.  I’m not sure where the entrepreneurial gene came from, and I certainly didn’t set out to be independent; it just happened.

I moved to San Francisco 15 months ago, and while I did look for full time employment, I found much more success working for myself.  In the Bay Area, Craigslist.com is huge, and I was able to get almost all of the work that I did through advertising my services, and responding to other’s help wanted posts.  As a matter of fact, that is how Financial Samurai and I got connected.  He needed some help with WordPress, and over the course of several months, we worked together on his site, tweaking, updating, and protecting it.  When he made the initial Yakezie pitch to me, it was easy to want to get on board.  I love building things and Yakezie was and still is a great challenge.

Silicon Valley

Wall Street in New York City is the “mecca” for anyone in the finance industry.  It is ground zero for worldwide money, commerce, and trade.  For a nerd, though, Silicon Valley is where much of what gets us excited happens.  Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, and Microsoft all have strong presence here as well as countless new startups hoping to be the next big thing. I have been lucky enough to be a part of the action.

In October of last year, I responded to a post on Craigslist for a front-end web design position.  The company was a small startup in Mountain View and I started working from their offices once per week.  Over the course of the next few months, I began coming in every day, and I took on a much more prominent role influencing the design and direction of our products.

And then, the company got acquired by Facebook.

Because I was a contractor, not an employee, I was not part of the deal, but the owner of the company was able to connect me with some others who were looking for designers and, less than a week later, I was working as an employee for the first time in a long time at SayNow in Palo Alto.  So here I am, working in the middle of the action.  I never thought I would be here.

The Yakezie

Over the coming months, I plan to continue updating the Yakezie.  I have a long list of new features that I want to code and small tweaks to make.  But more important than my vision for the site are the features that you as a community, the members of the site, want to see us add and improve.  I am on the site, forums, and behind the scenes daily.  You guys amaze me with everything that you do and the community that has been created here.

But, even more than that, I am excited about the scholarship initiative.  That is one of the coolest features of this site, and your generosity blows me away.

I am not sure if anyone is interested, but I have been toying with publishing a series of articles about how Yakezie.com runs behind the scenes from a technical perspective either in the forums or on my own site.  It would cover our hosting, backup strategy, content delivery network, and how we are using WordPress for all of the features of the site.  Thanks for reading this, and keep the comments and suggestions coming!

~Chris

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