Mark Bowen is a web developer, musician, graphic designer, electronics engineer, and helicopter pilot amongst holding many other talents, and is currently living in Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He is an avid Apple Macintosh user and has been so for well over 15 years now.
Mark studied Performing Arts in college and ended up getting a job at the college as a Music Technician. It was during this time that he gained his City & Guilds 224 in Electronics Servicing, so he is qualified to take a TV apart, put it back together again, leave bits out, and still charge for it!
Now working as a Senior Producer for the second largest independent commercial production house in the UK, Mark has made well over 30,000 adverts-/jingles-/music-based projects in the almost 8 years that he has been working there.
Mark has been developing with Adobe Flash, and was asked to review the Advanced PHP for Flash book by Friends Of Ed due to the work he did on a Flash-based chat application.
After Flash, Mark took up learning HTML/CSS, and now codes sites entirely by hand without the use of any WYSIWYG editors.
Nowadays Mark's preferred tool of choice for creating internet sites is the ExpressionEngine CMS platform as he states, "It is a designers dream come true" due to its very nature of keeping code and content completely separate from each other. Mark is an avid reader of the ExpressionEngine forums, and can usually be found there each day, answering questions wherever and whenever he can.
He is currently in the process of setting up an aviation-based photography website with his wife Sarah (who is also a helicopter pilot—Flight Instructor). It will host and sell the most professional images relating to aviation in the world.
This came about due to Mark being the sole designer for the largest military helicopter magazine in the world, and through his links with that, he now has access to the best aviation photographers in the business. Keep an eye out on the ExpressionEngine forums for when the site launches!