Lead Developer

In His Own Words

Ever since I was a kid I had always wanted to be a scientist, constantly learning new things and experiencing the joy of discovery. I enjoyed reading our home encyclopedias from cover to cover, and when I ran out of encyclopedias, I consumed whatever reading material I could get my hands on. To this day I still have all this trivia floating around somewhere in my brain, popping out more often than not at unexpected and perhaps even unwelcome times. (My friends have told me on more than one occasion that I tend to over-explain sometimes, even when they don’t need an explanation).

In high school I was introduced to personal computers and BASIC programming. It was love at first sight. I particularly liked the way I could type a few lines of code, and the computer would come to life when I ran those lines. For a while I would forget encyclopedias and explore the computer and what it had to offer.

Then came the Internet. Along with it came e-mail, chat and websites. Websites opened up the world to anyone and rekindled my addiction to learning anything and everything. In college I spent my stipends at local Internet cafes, but I didn’t care. I was learning. I learned how the Web worked, and I learned to carve my first few free, banner ad- and pop up-supported sites.

As the Internet evolved I kept up with it, and eventually I was making non-free, non-ad-supported sites for clients. As the number of sites I was making grew, I was finally able to resign from my full-time job and freelance for a living.

I eventually landed several projects for a client named Stephanie Cross, which developed into a long-term developer position. When Stephanie joined The Marketing Zen Group, she was kind enough to mention me and my previous work with her to Shama, and after a couple of weeks of test projects, I became a part of The Marketing Zen Group family.

Official Bio

Thabet-Abbas C. Burias finished his Bachelor of Science in Physics degree, cum laude, in 2001. During his college years, he worked part-time as a technician and web developer for a local Internet service provider. Immediately after graduation, he began teaching physics to science and engineering students at his alma mater.

He continued teaching for several years in different campuses throughout the country until four years ago, when, following his passion, he decided to take a leap and switch careers from academe into information technology.

After a rocky couple of years and a lot of effort to build his portfolio, he began getting clients for web development, software development and multimedia projects. He landed a full-time job as an in-house programmer/analyst for a municipal electric company and continued practicing his multimedia and web development skills. Before long he had so many projects in PSD to CSS/XHTML slicing, Joomla and Wordpress development and administration, and software programming that he had to choose between continuing his full-time position, or risking the unstable life of a freelancer. He chose the latter and began building his portfolio and expertise as a web specialist, which subsequently landed him a position with The Marketing Zen Group.