About

Bio

My name is Aaron Carlino.  I’m a web developer who is better known in the SilverStripe community by my whimsical pseudonym “Uncle Cheese.” I’ve been doing web development since 2005, and found my niche in SilverStripe programming after an exhaustive search for a content management solution that was welcoming to developers and would stay out of my way. Since then, I have established a strong reputation in the SilverStripe community as a mentor, support provider, and, most notably, a contributor of some of the application’s most popular modules including DataObjectManager, ImageGallery, and SWFUpload.

During the day, I’m employed full-time at Bluehouse Group as lead SilverStripe developer, surrounded by a team of talented designers, programmers, and HTML developers. At Bluehouse Group, I have worked on several sophisticated web applications built on SilverStripe, including All Earth Renewables, ISI, and Yestermorrow. In my spare time, I keep my SilverStripe thirst quenched by entertaining a variety of freelance projects which range from ad-hoc support work for my modules to full-featured web applications, including Xetic.org. In addition, I’m almost always working on new open-source contributions to the SilverStripe CMS, because, quite frankly, I can’t get enough of it.

When I’m not coding, I’m usually thinking about what I’d like to be coding, and when I’m not doing that, I enjoy cooking (and subsequently photographing) all kinds of delicious foods. I’m also talented guitar player and French speaker, and a connoisseur of all things Elvis Costello. I live a blessed and charmed life in beautiful northwestern Vermont with my wife and shih-tzu, Oscar.

Uncle Cheese? Why?

Before I had ever written a lick of PHP, much less even heard the words “silver” and “stripe” brought together in alliterative matrimony, I was pursuing a career in education, and took a job working one-on-one with a middle school student suffering from a cocktail of developmental disorders. On day one, I introduced myself as Mr. Carlino, and reached out to shake his hand. He refused the handshake, and looked up at me blithely, with a beaming smile, before pointing to me and averring, “Uncle Cheese.”

It was a branding that I never expected to last longer than that moment, let alone the next 180 days, but as luck would have it, the name stuck, and I was never called Mr. Carlino that year. I eventually learned to embrace the ridiculous name. Still to this day, I run into students from that school who are now graduating college, and they remember me as “Uncle Cheese” thanks to that persistent middle-school student who never failed to make me laugh. Sometimes I wonder what he would think of all this, but I then I realize how hard it would be to explain SilverStripe to him, and he probably wouldn’t care, anyway.

My Clients

Favorite soul-searching, pseudo-intellectual badass 90210 character:

Dylan McKay

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