Nicholas Bilyk is a freelance web developer from Minneapolis, MN. He started programming as a child, writing cheats for the QBasic games Nibbles and Banana. Nick's education in computers is mostly self-taught, but with a lot of resources and help from his father, Robert Bilyk, who at the time was a Computer Based Training instructor at St. Paul Tech, later the founder of Cyber Village Academy, and now the founder of LodeStar Learning. During the summers from Jr. High through High School Nick worked for his father installing and maintaining the school computers at Cyber Village. It was around then ('98) where he started getting into web technologies like Flash 4, HTML, and Javascript. After High School, Nick worked as a flash developer for Cyburrs Solutions. There he worked on flash applications for companies like VML and Sprint. After the dot com bubble burst and Cyburrs Solutions went out of business, Nick went back to school at the UofM to formalize his education in computer sciences. From there he got a job writing Flash e-learning interactions at Seward Inc. Nick worked there for three years, and learned many new languages there like coldfusion, J2EE, and PHP. After Seward, Nick married a beautiful composer, and within a year, went freelance thanks to the inspiration of two other independent blokes; Judah Frangipane and Toby Cryns. Nick is now the manager of the Minnesota Flash User's group, and in his scant free-time where he's not programming, he likes to play chess, foosball, rollerblading, racquetball, and skiing.