On Drupal.org for 13 years 1 month

Bio: 

I produced one of the first internet magazines distributed over the web in 1994. The e-journal was called O Theophilus. It was distributed on Common Ground with graphics and text for Windows and Macintosh users alike and uploaded to CompuServe and AOL. (Common Ground, by Farallon, was a precursor and competitor to Adobe's PDF, and actually produced much smaller files.)

I was also one of the first to produce full academic courses for the internet, with graphic images and hyperlinks. I became a developer of online education services for The Center For Biblical Literacy, and worked with that non-profit until 1998. It was undercapitalized and failed in 1998. Some of this early work is now available on The Scholar's Corner.

Because I was a pioneer, I'm pretty much self taught. There was no one to teach you back then! I also learned as I went along, so I picked up php/mysql and a host of other skills over the years, but never had the benefit of doing 6 months of full time training in any single aspect of web design. It might not have done me much good. With each new revolution, you have to unlearn as much as you learn. The switch from old html to CSS, the changes in ActionScript in Flash, etc. create the need for constant re-education. That's one of the drawbacks of longevity: you end up losing productive earnings every time a new revolution makes re-education mandatory.

Although I am also a minister, our mission churches in low-income neighborhoods were not intended to produce a viable income, but we still had to eat. So, I went full time and launched Peterson Design Studio, as a web design and marketing company in 1999.