My name is John Conde and I am a Web Developer for a medium-sized credit card processing company based in New Jersey. I've worked there for almost four years and as you can guess I am an expert in credit card processing. I've established merchant accounts for over 1,000 businesses covering almost every product/service and style. There are few in the industry who's knowledge parallels mine as I am knowledgeable in everything from sales to programing to equipment/software to Interchange, etc. so if you have a merchant account question definitely feel free to ask.

I built my first website back in 1997. It was, of course, a Geocities site. I was bad at web design but still made all of my friends and family check it out every time i made a change (which was every day). My knowledge grew and now I run my own company on the side called brainyminds. I have a partner named Sara who is actually the on who started the company. I joined on late last year and in April of this year we officially registered as an LLC in the state of New Jersey. We do everything from design to development and merchant accounts. We have also entered the web publishing business but we've only just begun with that so nothing exciting to report there. Overall we are doing well and growing at a good pace. I am very pleased with our progress.

I'm also very knowledgeable in Search Engine Optimization. (Yeah, everyone is an expert!). For those of you who have been to the SitePoint forums will have seen by now my Search Engine Optimization FAQ and Google FAQs. One thing you won't get from me when it comes to SEO is a bunch of nonsense and baseless info. And I'm not afraid to call it out when I see it.

I'm no newbie to forums, either. I'm a regular at SitePoint (I also go under the name of stymiee there). I am a Team Leader in their Grow and Manage Team which covers the SEO and eCommerce forums. Basically, I am in charge of that entire section from a member point of view (their staff structure is quite unique). I am very active in terms of posting and hopefully will be here, as well.

When I code I prefer to use PHP and MySQL running Apache on Linux (LAMP). I also know Perl, xHTML, CSS, and JavaScript (including using the DOM and AJAX). I write my xHTML and CSS to be valid.

I am an avid FireFox user and evangelist. I use 35 extensions at last count. I'm an expert spyware remover thanks to my newbie family and friends and I am also (almost) a certified ethical hacker. If I bothered to take the test I would be certified.

For fun I like to play roller hockey. I'm usually a goalie although I don't have any problems putting the biscuit in the basket as well. I also weight lift regularly and like to stay in shape although that darn pasta keeps finding its way to my belly.

I've gotten off to a pretty good start I think. Heck, I've already got one referral! Hopefully I'll hang around for a while and have some fun learning and growing with all of you.