About Macario

Greetings and salutations!

Based in New Orleans, i specialize in custom WordPress-powered sites, progressive web apps, and consulting businesses on what technology to use.

I’ve worked in tech for the last 17 years — a decade as a computer and printer technician in New York; switching to a career as a full-time developer and tech consultant after moving to New Orleans.

I’m the Founder of Fifth Pocket Labs and Fire & Wheel.

The stack for a majority of my web projects includes WordPress, PHP, and JavaScript. The last two years’ frenetic pace has me eyeing the tech i believe hits this intersection:

  • The most potential to make/maintain a financial living
  • Most in-demand
  • And is the most interesting or “fun” (to me).

Here’s a semi-exhaustive list of what tech i use.

In no particular order and without weight, below are the things that have recently piqued my interest. I’ve struck through things i looked into and/or am no longer interested in.

2018 June

  • Becoming a developer advocate. An AWS or WordPress one. Heck, i’d be interested in diving into Google Cloud Platform.
  • Google’s Firebase coupled with Ionic (thanks to Jorge Vergara, his books and being gung-ho about Firebase).
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect training/studying, including a myriad of their offerings, which i’ve written about on my blog. Recently purchased Udemy courses for four of the AWS Cloud certs.
  • Static site generators like Hugo.
  • Netlify.
  • Zapier-integrations.
  • Airtable.

2018 Sept

  • Headless CMSes.
  • CSS frameworks like Bulma, with which i redesigned this site.
  • Vue.js for PWAs and SPAs.
  • Serverless Framework.
  • De-coupled WordPress.
  • Decentralized web project, Solid, from inventor Tim Berners-Lee of World Wide Web fame.
  • Created Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) with WordPress as back-end
  • Twilio SMS and Voice apps

2019 September

Subscribe to the blog via the box at the bottom to see what’s brewing in my brain.

I love attending WordCamps throughout the US.

I’m writing some books

The topics are WordPress and web development.

With the WP books, the reader will have access to code snippets, a forum, and some other goodies. A specific topic i will address is using WordPress as the back-end for a mobile app, specifically creating a Progressive Web App with de-coupled WordPress and React / GatsbyJS.

The web development book is about helping people get their first jobs as web developers.

Planned release for the books is the fourth quarter of 2019. You can get on the pre-order list by going to Guides by Macario James.

I was the subject of a TV project
Several years ago Nomadness, of which i’m a board member, pitched a reality series showcasing an individual with the wanderlust bug — and i was the pilot’s chosen subject. Check it out underneath.

Insider info: nope, this wasn’t my first trip out the country; but we needed someone with the chops to sell being a newbie traveler. ^_^

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Wondering why you keep seeing lower-cased 'i' in my posts? Read -> Why ‘i’ is not capitalized