I was born on Christmas morning as a twin. I’m now 19, living in the western town of Cody, WY, working on endless projects—whether it’s going out hunting for unmapped waterfalls in the wilderness; watching NOAA radar obsessively, watching for night lightning storms to photograph; mixing rocket fuel made from powdered sugar on a camp stove; or simply developing websites and applications.
The Beginnings
My web development career really started back in middle school. One evening, on an online Flash forum I was a member of, a guy from Romania asked if anyone could develop a Flash-project-sharing community from scratch. Being a middle school student trying to do anything to get away from typical middle-school ruckus, I said I could do it—without really knowing how to do it.
My ignorance was my success. I taught myself PHP and JavaScript in the evenings after school and plugged away on the site. Months later, it got done and went live. The site grew a bunch, attracted many really talented designers & developers, and accumulated heaps of cool projects. However, to my dismay, the project turned to focus too much on making money instead of being a decent product after awhile—so I decided to leave. The site now has 100,000 registered members.
High School Years
In addition to working on the Flash community, I nerd’ed up and got super involved with Science Fair. The first year’s project was writing an algorithm and program to model and visualize erosion of large terrains. The next year, my twin brother and I teamed up for something even more ambitious. The project was called: “Fluorotype: Embedding Digital Information in Ultraviolet Data Matrices.” Now that’s a mouthful. In a nutshell, we developed a method to store and retrieve 1’s and 0’s hidden in the whitespace of printed documents. We also built a handheld circuit and Pocket PC software to read them. (This was before Sprint’s PhoneIQ system and iPhone barcode scanning.) We won 1st place in the largest category (Teams) of Intel’s International Science & Engineering Fair and were awarded top marks from the US Air Force for that one.
Now
Something really big is in the works—with a really lofty goal. It’s the culmination of a year and a half’s worth of work and mountain dew. That’s all I’m going to say about it at the moment. However, email me if you’d like to be in on it early before it gets opened up to the masses.
Outer Space
Another cool tidbit. There’s an asteroid named after me: 23296 Brianreavis. Take that, flaunters of personal “brand reach“! So if you’re ever 223 million miles off into space (like my head is sometimes), stop by and say “hi!”
