Spike Xavier

Spike’s first computer language was Fortran IV. His code never successfully compiled. But he never gave up! In 1998 he started a company called Merch.com with some of his friends. The company grew from 0 to over a million dollars a year in sales and was the home of the official online store for notables likes: No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Slayer, Tony Hawk, Social Distortion, the Offspring and many others. It was here that he put his passion for technology to work. If the systems went down, he didn't get paid. After 8 years of Merch.com he sold his shares and moved to Arizona to attend the .NET programming curriculum at Interface Technical Training in Phoenix. Upon completion of the program he was hired as the internal applications developer. It was in this position that he first met SharePoint 2003, and it was kind of confusing. Spike continued as a web developer and began to write articles and tech edit books. Eventually one of his articles became the cover article of ASP.NET Pro magazine. This resulted in a chance to write his first course based on using CSS effectively to present ASP.NET pages. The course was a success and soon he was teaching full time; he had found his calling. He was able to help others understand technologies quickly. When SharePoint 2007 came out, Spike took another look and fell in love. Spike has been working in depth with SharePoint since 2007. When he is not teaching SharePoint he is writing books, courseware, blogs, and articles on SharePoint, or implementing it as a consultant. He is the head of the Arizona SharePoint User group that meets monthly. He is in the final stages of writing a new course for SharePoint 2013, as well as his first SharePoint 2013 book. Spike has never forgotten what it was like to have the drive and the passion to learn a technology but not to have the instructor to help guide him there. He is committed to being the instructor that guides his students there.