I worked in the music business for 15 years doing mostly sales and a little marketing, working my way up from intern to middle management. Jive/Zomba (home of ‘N SYNC and Britney Spears) was the biggest record label I worked at but I found more satisfaction working at the smaller independent labels with Caroline Distribution being my best experience.

I was fully prepared to remain in the music biz until I retired but in August 1998, the digital downloading of music files began to gain popularity. This was a few months before Napster hit its zeitgeist and while I certainly did not know that Napster was coming, I knew that SOMETHING like Napster would come along eventually and that I would need a backup plan as far as my career was concerned.

About Kai Gittens, AKA Kaidez

Posted by Kai Gittens on January 24th

January 24, 2011

Name

Kai Gittens

Position

Founder of kaidez.com

Web Designer for Revlon/Almay

Mailing address

237 Park Ave.
New York, NY 10017
USA

Social Networking Info

• Blog
• Facebook Profile
• Twitter Page

This all occurred during the internet startup era brought on by the dot-com rush, which was still peaking. An ex-boss of mine had a real estate dot-com that he needed help with, so I went in and did some very basic office tasks while learning about all thing related to web design and development. Flash (back when Macromedia still owned it) really excited me so I studied that with a vengeance. That led to my learning HTML, JavaScript and a few other things and eventually, I had enough knowledge to take on freelance web design projects while still working in the music business during the day.

For the next seven years, my web design career became more and more abundant as the music business provided less and less job security. On the freelance end, I worked many small projects and a few high profile ones such as the United Nations and Trump Magazine. All of this made my resume look good and I eventually landed my current job as a web designer at Revlon Cosmetics, allowing me to leave the music business for good in 2005.

I’m now focusing on learning the more structured aspects of front-end web development, particularly HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, Silverlight and all of the fancy JavaScript libraries that all the cool kids are into right now. I’m also peeking at database development, but only peeking as I can only learn so much at a certain pace. And of course, I’m upping my WordPress development skills constantly and feel that I’m getting better and better with it everyday.

In a nutshell: I like to learn code…this blog is a journal of what I learn and and how I learned it.

Also, in case you’re wondering, “Kai” rhymes with “why”. Kaidez means “kai-dez” as in “kai design.”