Who is Vu Tran?

The Person

My name is Vu Tran. I'm currently a full-time college student enrolled in Santa Monica College. I reside in the beautiful city of Los Angeles, California.

The Hobbies

You can find me doing a lot of things in my free time. Besides making websites and programming applications, I love to drive. I am a big car enthusiast, but I don't illegally race. I also like to play several sports like golf, tennis, basketball, bowling, and snowboarding. Whether I am good or not at any one of those I mentioned is a mystery to you. Oh yes, I forgot to include the generic answer of "hanging out" with some friends.

The Breakdown

I've been professionally designing and developing websites since 2004. It was during age 12 when I was first exposed to the Internet and HTML overall and haven't really developed an interest into web design until 2004, when I created my first complete website with just HTML and CSS.

I've entered the web industry with a niche to make money online. It was during the time when MySpace was beginning to become popular, and sprouts lots of MySpace resource related websites. While that niche is horrible when I think back about it, I have learned many skills and techniques such as search-engine optimization, search-engine rankings page, page ranks, pay-per-click marketing, and also advertisement networks such as Google Adsense. After a lot of trial-and-error, I moved on to the next biggest thing which was Facebook and their developer's platform.

My proficiency in PHP and JavaScript has increased dramatically when Facebook released their developers platform, allowing developers to create web applications for their social-networking website. I picked up several new skills while developing Facebook applications such as SQL programming, working with API's, and server management. Some of my application didn't see release, and there are some that became quite popular without any effort of marketing or promotion besides word-of-mouth.

With the help of several Facebook applications that I had developed in the first year of the platform release, I obtained an intern position at a small local web marketing company, learning the "ins" and "outs" of the web industry. As part of my duties, I have learned to talk and discuss the requests of clients directly, and manage several website projects. I've also started to work on improving and brushing up my skills in HTML and CSS by following the W3C standards and allow all my web creations to work on all operating systems and web browsers. As an ongoing project, I am currently working under the company to create a new content-management system that is both developer-friendly, and user-friendly, as well as search-engine friendly.

Currently, I am working as an employee of the same local web marketing company. With my acquired skills in the web industry, I hope to someday own my own web development firm. I'm on the right path, but I am still far from reaching my goal.