About

About The Big Blue House

I grew up in a big blue house. The big blue house is a central theme to my artwork. Sitting in front of a computer in the basement of this big blue house is where I learned how to build websites so it seem fitting to call my company, which I incorporated in 2000, 'The Big Blue House Production'.

About Me - Jacob Rockowitz (aka Jake)

After graduating from Purchase College with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in 1996, my first interaction with the Internet involved a trip to the Grand Army Plaza public library. I was looking for ideas on how to make a living. After many hours of surfing the web for career ideas, I realized website building was something I could do.

Jake’s Bodega, my first website, highlighted my artwork and used the big blue house as the metaphor for the site structure. Using this website, I got my first job as an HTML coder and spent the next several years working for several ‘Dot Com’ companies.

After hand-coding HTML for a half a dozen large scale websites, I knew there had to be a better way to build them. So I built my first JavaScript-based content management system (CMS) for my personal resume website.

In 2000, I started working with Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and built a content management system in ColdFusion for them. My approach was this: I compared the construction of a home to software development. And in the building of a home or a website, occasionally do it right, you need to tear it down and start over, which is exactly what I set out to do with the MSKCC website.

In 2001 the reconstruction continued. It required rebuilding the content management system using ASP/Jscript and resolving dozens of issues as well as modularizing every possible component of the application. I ensured this application would scale to handle MSKCC’s growing needs on the world-wide web. The CMS I built for MSKCC is called the Inettool and is still being used by MSKCC for their internal and external websites.

Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is a wonderful client -- working with them is a gratifying experience and I continue to be dedicated to improving their website and online presence.