About Me

Who is “me”? Neil Dickens, sole proprietor

You’ll notice I refer to myself in the first person singular. That’s because I’m just one guy. I don’t make pretenses about being the biggest company — I’m a sole proprietor and I’ll keep it that way. When you deal with Connettrics.Net, you don’t deal with a large company, and you won’t have the struggles and expenses that go along with that. The buck stops with me. I am Connettrics.Net.

Experience and Expertise

It all started with being tasked to edit an online forum for my church singles group back in 2001 or so. Good ol’ phpBB. It was at that point that my previous attitude toward databases was turned on its head. Having struggled with a detestable database class in college and having experienced the horrors of MS Access in the real world, I wanted no part of databases till I met MySQL late one night. PHP and MySQL were made for each other, the web, and, as it turns out, me.

From there I built my own email list management system, a couple personal and small business websites for myself and others, and got a ‘real job’ as a database application programmer at a motorcycle company. For the past almost two decades, I’ve been a web developer++ at my current company, running our several websites, getting my hands dirty in every layer, including bits of OS and Apache, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL database management, FTP, SSH, APIs connecting to third-party vendors, and hooks into our back-end ERP.

The Web — it’s what I do.