From humble beginnings
Hi! As you've probably guessed, I'm Ari. A developer from Adelaide, Australia.
I got into coding when I was 12 years old. It started with going through the JavaScript course in codecademy. I was taught how to make the web page display an alert, and it blew my mind 🤯.
From there, I taught myself a lot about web development, and was able to collect quite a few of my highschool friend Facebook logins and teacher school credentials via phising pages. After playing with JavaScript & PHP for a couple of years, I took a Udemy course in Golang in 2016 and that's when I had my first obsession with a programming language.
One of my most popular questions on Stackoverflow was from this period, asking about how to read a file with Go.
Leaving high school
In high school, I took HTML classes thinking it would be somewhat enjoyable since it's something I'm good at. Though, one day during class the teacher asked me if I also use HTML tables to place items side-by-side as "that's what she does" (which is a horrible way to align items in modern HTML 🤦). I realised at that moment that high school had nothing to offer me when it came to my passion.
For this reason, along with the fact that I wasn't enjoying high school in general and tended to skip classes often, I decided to leave high school and pursue a diploma at TAFE (TAFE is like trade school in Australia).
Starting my diploma
In the middle of 2016, I started studying a diploma of web development at TAFE. I was much happier finally since I felt like I was getting a headstart in life by studying the topic I'm so passionate about.
I excelled in my classes, got great marks and surprisingly quite enjoyed photography.
I studied at TAFE for a year, and decided to have a brief break from it. During this time I took an incredible short holiday to Bandung, Indonesia.
An internship
Early in 2018, I was introduced to a designer and developer who were running a digital agency called Sky Foundry. I brought my, at the time, 7 year old Lenovo laptop to their office, and briefly showed them some random projects I've worked on over the years. The very next day, they onboarded me as an intern, and I was working full-time hours.
I started off doing some small edits and adding features to some existing client websites they had, and a couple of short months later they had offered me a permanent position with them. At this point I hadn't finished highschool and hadn't finished my diploma at TAFE, but decided the real world experience was much more valuable than further study. In a way, I was still studying but being paid for it!
At the time of me becoming permanent, Sky Foundry received a huge client building a crypto-currency exchange platform. I was brought onto the project along with another extremely talented senior developer. Over the next 9 months, we built the frontend of a crypto-exchange in VueJS. A few developers joined and left the team during that time, but in the end, myself, the senior developer, and the two partners stayed throughout it all.
For the next year, I worked on many different clients, including Shopify stores, custom Wordpress themes, restaurant websites, crypto marketing pages, and much more.
Working with Energi
After working with Sky Foundry, I joined Energi. The offer was incredible for me as a 20 year old developer. I was being paid 75% in Bitcoin, and 25% in Energi.
I worked with Energi for 8 months, during which time I helped develop the Energi Arcade Discord bot, Energi Nexus, along with some other projects. My skills were recognized quite fast, and I was performing code reviews in some of the projects within a month.
During my 8 months with Energi, Bitcoin was priced at around $3,000 - $8,000 USD. After Energi, Bitcoin slowly rose, peaking at $60,000 USD. This situation was incredible for me financially, as my earnings from 8 months of work had grown to 10x its value.
Open-source & freelance
At the time of leaving Energi I had figured I worked full time with companies enough and decided my goal would be to build a product and business of my own, rather than search for a new company to work with.
Along with some occasional freelance work, I built a couple of successful Shopify apps during 2021 which helped support me during this time. I also started working heavily with Rust 🦀, my current programming language obsession.
During the second half of 2021, I was living in Indonesia for 6 months, and dived deep into event sourcing and developed a library called Thalo.
The response I received from the community around Thalo was incredible, and it's become a project I'd like to evolve much further.
Joining Lunatic 🌚
My most latest endeavour has been working with Lunatic, an Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly written in Rust.
The creator and team are the most friendly I've worked with, and I've had the privilege of learning a whole lot about the project.