My name is Gerardo Stephen Molina, III, but you can call me Jerry;
I was born in the Manhattan borough of New York City in 1976, to parents who lived in the Bronx.
Within a year of my birth, they moved to Jersey City, New Jersey. about 5 years later, we moved to Elizabeth, NJ, and about 6 years after that, we moved to Union, NJ, where I attended Union High School.
While in High School, I accepted a summer internship offer with Bell labs, where I initially became aware of emerging internet technologies, including Fidonet, Usenet and early text-based web browsers such as Lynx, blissfully unaware of the chaos to come.
I graduated High School and was accepted into the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1994, largely unaccustomed to being independant and riding the bus into Newark, as Campus housing was out of our financial reach.
In 1999 I started working at a campus-affiliated technology company run by NJIT Computer Science professors known as Xanthus, Inc., which started my journey through web development and learning a variety of programming languages as they became pertinent.
I found myself out of a job and without many prospects in 2002, living with roommates and needing to make my share of the rent, so I took a job delivering medications to nursing homes, first in south Jersey, then promoted to an overnight dispatcher role where I would send drivers on ‘STAT’ runs, taking many shorter runs myself. I regularly applied to tech positions within the pharmacy, but they unfortunately did not bear fruit.
I finally got my ‘big break’ in late 2006, when I accepted a job offer from Pointroll, Inc. in Conshohocken, PA. And by 2007 I had moved to southeastern PA, where I have lived ever since. I worked as a ‘Production Engineer,’ which meant that I received web banner ads, designed and developed either in-house or from other agencies, and edited them in Adobe Flash to run through our hosting engines and API’s to record user clicks and interactions with the ads, and make sure that the ads complied with the restrictions of the hosting websites, including K-weights and display sizes. Many of these banner ads were incredibly complex, with some companies adding full interactive games into their ‘expandable’ banners. This was also my first experience converting and learning the nuances of in-banner video.
After nearly 10 years with Pointroll, I found myself again searching for work, with the majority of my experience being in Flash Actionscript, already regarded as a ‘dead language,’ so I had to quickly follow up on some of the training from my last year of Pointroll in emerging HTML5 technologies, including Javascript, which I did have plenty of familiarity with, going back to my early days at Xanthus and The University for Medicine and Dentistry of NJ, and CSS, which was part of our HTML5 training initiative.
I worked mostly Freelance for a couple of years, honing my skills as a Front-End Developer, first building ads, then Emails, then Websites. Most recently I worked for the Now-defunct Petsmart subsidiary companies, Pet360/PetFoodDirect, and vintage luxury fashion reseller What Goes Around Comes Around (WGACA). I am currently looking to start the next chapter of my career story.
Like many children of the Early 80’s I am drawn now to a lot of the properties that were marketed to me in the form of after-school and saturday-morning cartoons. I have a collection of Vintage and Modern Transformers and Voltron toys, as well as a collection of Marvel comics from the oversaturated 90’s as well as modern collectibles.
I also spend way too much time playing a lot of classic/retro video games that I had played in my youth, going back to the Atari 2600 (Or the Sears version, which I had as a child) I also enjoy playing Sandbox and ‘Factory’ games that involve a lot of problem solving, calculation and exploring, along with some modern role-playing games that emulate the feel of the late-80’s early 90’s games.
I have a taste in music that is getting more eclectic as I get older, mostly veering on different flavors of ‘heavy rock/metal,’ but with a preference toward ‘progressive’ rock/metal. Basically if it’s a long song that changes tempo, key, or melody throughout, you have my interest, especially if the lyrics are introspective and have something to say.
After a short stint of living in Philadelphia, I now live with my beautiful and extremely supportive girlfriend, Simone, and her dog (now our dog), Lola. I have started getting involved with learning about local government and I have delved into political canvassing and volunteering at the polls on election day.