My Story
Hello! I'm Ras, and I enjoy building and learning new things. My passion for technology started early. When my parents bought my brothers and me our first PC (a Compaq 386), I was about six years old. From the moment that thing sat on the table, I was hooked. At first, I mostly used it to play video games, but when the movie Hackers came on TV, it literally changed me. From then on, I became really interested in learning about tech and had this deep drive to understand how things work.
I still remember a time when I was trying to wrap my head around difference between binary and hexadecimal numbers from some random hacker website. Ah, what a time that was! When I was about 14, I decided I wanted to understand how websites worked, so I ordered my first-ever technical book: HTML: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly. It was a reference manual for HTML4, but I read it page by page like it was a novel.
After making some progress, I didn’t become a famous hacker or anything like that, but I did create my first website—a basic photo gallery from a school trip to Italy. I went on to create a few more static sites, including one for our World of Warcraft guild. After a while something changed. This was the early 2000s, and I remember being frustrated by all the browser incompatibilities and painful table layouts. I'm not sure if tech was that bad back then or if it was just my puberty kicking in, but I suddenly lost interest.
A few years later, just as I was entering university, my passion for tech was reignited—this time with an interest in Linux and networking. Shortly after earning my bachelor's degree, I started working for Red Hat, which was a dream job! I learned something new every day and loved it.
Few years into the job, my brother asked me to build a website for his business. I took on the challenge and I realized there had been huge progress in the web development, and many of the pain points I'd experienced before had been addressed. The building experience felt fresh and different. I fell in love with web development once again and decided to give it a real shot this time—I’ve not looked back since.
