About me

Hi. I’m Garrett Albright. I was born and raised in northern California – not the San Francisco Bay Area, but in the large gap of land between there and the Oregon border which tends to fall off the radar of most people.

Some of my earliest memories are playing Atari 2600 games with my cousin, and my favorite toy in middle school was the Commodore 64 handed down from my uncle, so I guess it was somewhat inevitable I’d become a computer nerd. After upgrading to a Mac in high school, I taught myself HTML and started building silly web sites. I went to college to get a CS degree, of course, but I had a hard time with the math classes, and after one semester I panicked and switched to English Literature. I still kept up an interest in computers, though, teaching myself web development with PHP and MySQL. After graduating, I floundered about for an English degree-related job for a while, but it simply was not meant to be. Part of that floundering about included spending a year in Nagoya, Japan, teaching English as a second language to adults and children; this was a horrible job for a horrible company, but aside from that, I enjoyed the experience of living in a new country and learning Japanese. After returning from Japan, the floundering continued, but fate would have it that a local marketing agency, Precision Intermedia, was looking for a web developer, and I just happened to know a few things about that. I applied and got the job, and it soon became apparent that I had found my career, not another job.

It was there that I found Drupal, and gradually we began to use it in more and more of our web projects there. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was pretty close. I worked on developing a few Drupal projects, and eventually I began itching for a new job with more of a focus on Drupal – and, yes, frankly, one that paid more. So I left Precision Intermedia on amicable terms, and, after a few false starts, found my current gig, telecommuting for GoingOn, which makes a platform for building web sites to support higher ed-level classes – so students can post questions for their teacher or themselves, share web sites relevant to the class topic, etc.

In Spring of 2011, I managed to work out returning to Japan to study Japanese full-time at the Yamasa Institute (warning: horrible web site), and that’s where I am now; living in central Japan, working in between Japanese language classes. I began doing more work with Alethia, a Japanese Drupal development house, because they were able to pay me in delicious yen - have you seen the dollar-to-yen exchange rate recently? Not pretty.

I’m currently twenty-nine years old. In my free time, when I’m not working on Drupal-related stuff, I enjoy playing video games, reading, and similar nerdly pursuits. On a possibly related note, I am unmarried and without children.