Justin Skolnick lives and works in Chicago.

When work was thin, I worked in textbooks. I spent three years pouring manuscript into templates and styling the text. While the work was dull and repetitive and nothing made it tolerable, I came to appreciate thorough, well-considered style sheets and clear, restrained markup.

The discipline and care that I learned those three years naturally affected my later web site work. A colleague integrating my HTML with a Rails back-end called my markup “immaculate” — enough thought went into the code that I wasn’t ashamed to agree.

I have real experience.

Besides serving a handful of freelance clients, I’ve worked in-house for Chicago’s Thirdwave, LLC, Designkitchen, One Design Company, and VSA Partners.

“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.” — attributed to Steve Wozniak

However much I enjoy my work, I see an end to it, and I’m satisfied with that end. As a student of philosophy and history, I’ve seen the ways that technology, when not applied to specific problems, can produce even greater problems. I believe the tools we develop should address practical problems, as a bridge addresses the problem of crossing a river, and to leave us alone when we’re done with them.