The chronicles of a highly optimized caffeine-to-code converter
Let There Be Light (green)
My journey in the digital wilderness began in the late 90s when I was still just a kid with undiagnosed future caffeine dependency. Those were the glorious internetless (yes, that’s a word now) days of Borland C++, Basic, and Pascal. No Stack Overflow to save you, no MDN, nor MSDN – just some mysterious programming books my brother and I excavated from beneath a bed like archaeological treasures.
I was mesmerized by their covers adorned with PC parts and cryptic numbers, blissfully unaware I was about to embark on the path of permanent eye strain and nocturnal coding sessions. There I discovered the wonders of HGR with its “breathtaking” 280×192 resolution and the arcane art of drawing with code. My first programmable green pixel
The New Millennium
Flash forward to 2001. I have my first “modern” PC – a beast with a 700 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM, and a fan noise that puts vacuum cleaners to shame. That same year, I penned my first HTML pages in Notepad and Visual Basic 6 was my first encounter with desktop programming. From there I gradually began using C++, MFC and eventually C# when it debuted in 2003.
Back then, JavaScript was still learning to crawl while Flash was the undisputed cool kid on the block. It was revolutionary – design in Macromedia Flash, sprinkle in some ActionScript magic, and watch it perform flawlessly in any browser (provided users had installed the right plugin, updated it, allowed it to run, maybe few more steps I forgot…). This is the time when I worked on the first project to ever earn me money and Flash made it possible.
University Days and Professional Evolution
By 2007, I had survived my freshman year at university. Adobe Flash had metamorphosed into Flex 3 and 4, and I landed my first full-time gig developing a kid-friendly MMO. The work on that game was amazing, but it had to evolve with technologies. Several years later, this virtual world evolved into mobile games for iOS and Android, compiled as AIR mobile hybrid applications. Oh, and let’s pay our respects to Windows 8 Mobile – yes, it’s easy to forget it existed, but it introduced me to XAML and C# for mobile and desktop development.
Goodbye Flash, Hello Future
In 2013 I decided I need a change. My Flash & Flex days were over, long live the new king – HTML5. Thus began my freelancing era: web clients with HTML5, CSS3, and SASS, Bootstrap (versions 2, 3, and 4 – because choosing one would be too simple) with elastic, responsive, and fluid designs (mobile phones are a thing now). It was indeed a wild ride, with projects ranging from “need it yesterday” to “we have several months” (but will change requirements weekly). Development had to be rapid and utilize a single codebase for websites and mobile apps. Enter Cordova (a.k.a. PhoneGap, a.k.a. “almost native but not quite”), which powered business apps and several games with heavy canvas API drawing.
Back-End and Beyond
All those mobile-first websites and apps demanded backends. And backends they received—Spring Boot, Laravel, CodeIgniter 3, and Twig templates. Soon, those hybrid mobile apps weren’t “native enough”, so I ventured into React Native – delivering the promise of write-once-run-anywhere that only requires platform-specific code every third second feature.
From there, adopting Node with Express was as natural as a developer reaching for coffee at midnight. The journey culminated in a massive content management platform heavily leveraging AngularJS and jQuery. That AngularJS eventually transformed into Angular 2, 3, 4, 5… 17, 18, 19 (who’s counting anymore) along with TypeScript, which made large JavaScript projects manageable again by adding types.
The Untold Stories
While juggling all the above, I contributed to several projects of various scales, featuring React, Redux, and server-side React rendering. I would love to elaborate on these adventures, but NDAs in real life are the equivalent Heroes III “Blind” spell cast on my portfolio.
That’s all I have to say so far, but the story is not over yet.
New chapters are being written in languages yet to be deprecated.
Interested in working together?
Contact Me