At the age of four, my parents and I left Tempe, Arizona, and ventured into the heart of Europe, to live in the capital city of the Czech Republic, Prague. My family traveled there as missionaries to work with the local church to develop student ministries, just a year after the the country split from Czechoslovakia in the Velvet Revolution. Growing up overseas gave me a cultural experience like nothing else and a much wider perspective of the world. Europe branded me with a passion for travel and culture that has followed me to this day.

Since my family and I have moved back to Tempe, in the summer of 2007. I’ve had a chance to intern for several of the most innovative and exciting design and development agencies in the metro Phoenix area, including Perk, Integrum and Keane Creative. Working for all of these awesome agencies has given me a chance to be involved in multiple exciting projects and gain the practical workplace knowledge not taught in high school, as well as aiding in funding my passion for photography.

I first became interested in web development in 6th grade, where our class assignment was to create our own personal web page. Although, I would cringe looking back at what I created then, the experience left me with a longing for more. To discover how everything worked, to break things and put them back together again. This passion has grown since then to all things from laptops to webpages, but it always leaves me with a desire to learn more.

Currently, after graduating from McClintock High School, I am pursuing my degree in Business Management at Mesa Community College while I Intern at Terralever. The work that I do at Terralever isn’t the typical intern work, such as sending faxes or refilling staplers but it’s getting to do what I love, web development! It gives me a chance to work on huge projects such as Red Bull Stratos or Flugtag, collaborations I would never have a chance to be a part of working freelance. It gives me a chance to utilize my abilities to the fullest extent. I believe that the experience and training I receive while I intern here at Terralever is as valuable as the teaching I could be studying at ASU. The web is growing explosively and the demand for current and up to date programming is increasing. It’s difficult for college course content to keep up with the growing pace of the web. That’s why I believe that interning at Terralever, not only gives me practical workspace knowledge but allows me to work with technologies that aren’t being taught.

One of the best parts about working at Terralever is having the ability to go to developers who are higher up than me and get their help and assistance in any project I am working on or struggling with. Not only does this teach me new ways to problem solve and tackle different issues, it prevents me from hitting walls or road blocks in which I am unable to solve a problem myself. I can get immediate help and feedback, which makes me significantly more productive. I get the opportunity to learn an exceptional amount of web development as well as teach others what I have learned, or what experience I have gained.

My passion is to travel back to the Czech Republic and to shoot photography. For now I want to continue pursuing my career in web development as well as continue rock climbing, playing the drums, shooting photography, drinking lots of tea and living for the gospel. Follow me on my blog at http://www.connormcsheffrey.com/

Originally posted to the Phoenix Business Journal

Terralever has become one of slightly more than two dozen companies to be recognized as a preferred developer by Facebook.

The Tempe-based interactive marketing agency is one of 14 companies in the Facebook preferred developer consultant program, which can build programs for the massive social networking platform.

Terralever has been involved with Facebook applications since 2007 and has built programs for companies ranging from Apple and BMW to Red Bull and the University of Phoenix.

“Clearly, Facebook is one of the most innovative companies in the world. In the last five years they have strategically found ways to capture the attention of users everywhere, attracting more then 350 million active users worldwide,” said Chris Johnson, Terralever CEO. “We are honored and excited to be a part of this new program and to have the opportunity to continue to develop new experiences on Facebook Platform.”

We’ve brought on many new faces this year to support our awesome clients and still, due to landing a significant contract from an international company, we plan on hiring even more. We’re looking for some solid talent, so check out our careers page and see if you would make a positive addition to our team. Oh yeah, and I can’t forget to mention, we’re super-fun too! WE even got some tv coverage recently – ABC News did a story on local companies that are hiring, and Terralever’s very own Scott Miraglia is featured!

So, check us out, we’re super excited about growing our team!!

Andy Richter, Managing Partner of Terralever, died Thursday evening, October 1. Our hearts go out to Andy’s family and loved ones.  We’re shocked and saddened by his passing and we share their grief and deep sadness. Andy Richter was an exceptional individual, friend and community leader. Andy’s passing is a big loss for our community. He will be missed by all of us privileged to have known and worked with him.

As founder and CEO of Terralever I will continue to lead the organization.

Thank you for your overwhelming outpouring of kindness and love for our fellow colleague.

Originally posted to sodaspeaks.ning.com by Natalie Certo on August 18th, 2009

Vote for SoDA’s SXSW 2010 Panel Discussion – Best Digital Agency Advice and Practices

SoDA will again be attending South by Southwest (SXSW) 2010 and hopefully hosting panel discussions (with your help by voting) this coming March in Austin, TX.

As most of you know the PanelPicker is an online system that allows the SXSW community to have a significant voice in programming Interactive, Film, and Music conference activities (panels, presentations, discussions, demonstrations, etc.).

If you are interested to hear SoDA’s SXSW 2010 panel “Best Digital Agency Advice and Practices” vote here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3898

Also please tweet, post, email, morse code (by whatever means necessary) the message to your friends and industry affiliates. See you there!

The American Marketing Association’s (AMA) Phoenix Chapter held its 7th Annual Spectrum Awards this past Wednesday. Every year, the event recognizes Valley professionals in the fields of advertising, direct marketing, multi-cultural marketing, public relations and others. This year, Terralever was honored to win in two separate categories:

Existing Service or Product Marketing Campaign, for our Red Bull Flugtag campaign and Online Advertising Creative, for our Red Bull banner campaigns.

Congratulations to the Red Bull team and thank you for all of your hard work, the awards were well deserved!!

To learn more about AMA Phoenix and the Spectrum Awards you can check out their website here.

Phoenix Ad Blog wrote a nice article about our Grand Opening Bash.

Check it out: Phoenix Ad Blog

Thanks James Archer for a great article!

In response to a challenge set forth by our friend’s over at Gangplank – Terralever has decided to host a food drive at our new office. Our goal is to collect 1 ton of food…Yes, 1 ton of food. The food we are collecting will be donated to St. Mary’s Food Bank and distributed to families across Arizona.

Currently, there are more then 857,000 Arizonans that are living in poverty and the demand for food at St. Mary’s is up 90%! It’s plain and simple; they need our help.

If you would like to donate to the food drive you can drop off your non-perishable items at our new office space:

425 S. Mill Ave. Suite 201
Tempe, AZ 85281
(480) 839-1080
Mon-Thu 8:30am-5:30pm

We are looking forward to getting the community involved and seeing if we can surpass our goal – Not to mention, getting some hungry tummies fed!

As for Gangplank, well, we’ll let our cans do the talking.

For those of you who didn’t have the opportunity to see Joel Neubeck’s Mix ’09 presentation in person you can still watch the entire video online. The presentation titled, Creating a Great Experience on Digg with Windows Internet Explorer 8, demo’s some pretty cool stuff including a slick Silverlight 3.0 webslice.

Joel has a very diverse background which includes experience in ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, digital print and image processing as well as service-oriented web development – he is also a Microsoft Silvelight MVP. If you’re interested in learning about Internet Explorer 8 and how Terralever was able to use it’s powerful new features to change the way users interact with the Digg website, you should definitely check out this presentation.

Oh yeah, and a shout out to Joel – Joel, you did an awesome job and we are proud to have you on the Terralever Team!

Joel Neubek, Terralever’s Director of Technology, is presenting at this years Mix Conference in Las Vegas.

Joel will be talking about how Terralever was able to use the powerful new features of Internet Explorer 8 to change how users interact with the Digg website.

Those who stop by his presentation will learn how using Accelerators and web slices changed the way users are able to discover, as well as simplify submitting stories to Digg. He will also be looking at how taking advantage of these awesome features can improve a user experience, while increasing the number of users visiting your site.

If you would like to attend Joel’s presentation it will be taking place on Thursday March 19th from 2:30-3:45 pm at The Venetian in Las Vegas – presentation room, San Polo 3501.

To register for the event or to check out more details, you can visit The Mix website here.

We hope to see you there!