About Me...Extended

In case you find this helpful, here's just a little more info about me:

When I was in high school and we were learning Pascal and BASIC on Apple IIEs, Mr. Braithwaite, our instructor was missing one day. We all sat around for a few minutes wondering what to do, then I got up and taught...and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It was probably the first time I realized how much I loved teaching, and teaching technology.

My love affair with computers and programming stuck with me, but I was drawn towards humanities in college and kept computers and programming as a hobby.

When I graduated from college with an English Literature degree, everyone was asking me, "What are you going to do with an English degree." At that point, like most English majors, I had no idea, I just knew that I enjoyed reading, analysis, and writing. That approach landed me my first post-graduate job--stuffing soap in boxes for $4.30/hour as a temp at a local factory. Yes, all of that hard work for four years had paid off!

But eventually I got my first job as an instructional writer at a local software company, writing and doing instructor-led training.

A few years later, when I was a training manager for a software company in Vancouver, WA (where we lived for about 10 years), I built my first e-learning course, with Toolbook (that was in 1998) and realized I had found my love! Teaching, writing, media, and computer programming combined into one discipline. It was a dream come true. Shortly after that, in 2000, I founded Rapid Intake. Since then I have been immersed in e-learning design and development, and of course, entrepreneurship.

I now live near Salt Lake City, Utah, in the United States, with my wife and three children.

For a more official bio, you may find this useful:

Garin Hess has been managing, designing and developing interactive e-learning solutions for over ten years. He has worked as instructional designer, developer, technical lead, and project manager on various projects that have produced solutions for a variety of organizations, including large-scale implementations. He is the co-author of four e-learning development titles on using Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash to create e-learning solutions. He has also been an Adjunct Professor in the Instructional Technology program at Brigham Young University (Hawaii). He is currently the CEO of Rapid Intake, a firm that helps organizations learn faster by opening the rapid interactive course development process to everyone with its rapid e-learning development tools Flashform and Unison.