Who's behind the screen?
A look at who I am and how I got here
By Dickie Lierman
I’m Dickie Lierman, the Lead Developer, and co-owner of Lierman International LLC. I’ve been a creative type for my whole life, and that’s what brought us both to this place in the internet.
You see, when I was 16, I just knew I was going to be something. The thing is, this isn’t the something I ever thought I’d be. Get this, I thought I was going to be a touring musician. I had a guitar, and some software, and just enough PC to put them together and record.
After several years of practice, I actually started playing live with my band. A LOT. When you play a lot of gigs, you need a lot of promotional material, but you know the stereotype of the musician on a budget. I worked for the State of Tennessee at the time, doing unimaginably terrible work, for an insanely low wage. I fit that stereotype to a t. I still needed those promos though.
Like I said, I had a PC… In my mind that’s all I really needed to produce the materials I had to have. Flyers, posters, and of course, lots of cool graphics for my MySpace page. Yeah… one of those guys. You know what though? I was right! That’s all I needed!
I had a need, and a way to fill that need. I got some photo-editing software and went to work learning the ins and outs of it, creating material for my band, and any others that wanted it. Pretty soon, I was creating MySpace themes for my group and other locals too… And so it began.
“You see, when I was 16, I just knew I was going to be something. The thing is, this isn’t the something I ever thought I’d be. Get this, I thought I was going to be a touring musician…”
The story of my music career ends in the inevitable way you think it does. Sputtering out as I got older. I still record and play, but now it’s basically for the sake of nostalgia. What did last was that job I mentioned.
It was a very physically demanding job. It was normal to come home with someone else’s fluids on you… er… me. We’ll just say that the job of a psych tech is a thankless one, and move on, because that’s exactly what I did… move on… eventually. We’ll get there.
You know that PC that had treated me so well? I decided I was going to put it to work again. It had done all I had asked and more, and here I was, tasking it with yet another, in a long list of jobs. I had to find something that wasn’t going to leave me broken in my 40s. This time it’s job was to get me a job. No… a career.
My brother, my mentor, and the CEO of Lierman International LLC, was already making a good living in IT, but that side of things wasn’t a direction I wanted to go. I wanted to do something that played to my creative nature. I considered graphic design. It’s what got me started after all. I soon came to learn that there just wasn’t room for a poor self-taught like me. Not in Tennessee anyways.
Andrew called me one day and said “If you’ll learn to write code in enough languages that you can build functional websites, I can get you some freelance work.” That day I got on my PC, looked up w3schools.com, and started with the foundations, HTML, and CSS.
It wasn’t long before I had a firm grasp on those, and wanted more, as any creative, curious person would. I started including jQuery, because all toys are better with moving parts. Of course, if you really want to move parts in more than superficial ways, you need to play with data. PHP enters the scene.
This was great for me, but I had bigger ideas than I could possibly see through in the short term. I needed a framework to fill in the gaps. This is when I found WordPress, and my goodness was it a dream come true. After a while, I had created my own highly modified version of UserCake, a PHP framework that could be built on to do anything.
I built things like a football bet tracking system, Project Proson, and websites for several clients based on this frame work. The clients came as Andrew said they would, and eventually I built my resume to a point where I could get an entry level developer job, and that’s exactly what I did. Without ever stepping foot in a college.
Since then, I’ve been working my day job as a web developer and quality assurance tester for a large firm that develops insurance policy and claims administration systems, and freelancing at night. Well, as is the way of things, that company downsized my position along with several others in our division.
I’m taking it as a positive. This will give me an opportunity to find a more creative source of steady income, and I can spend more time on client projects. If you need a website, you’re in the right place. Thanks for reading my story, and I hope you head over to the contact page, and get started on a quote now!