This post is an introduction to the DrakeAFK blog detailing who I am, what I do, why I made this blog, and what you can expect to find here.
I will try to keep it short and sweet, but I am not known for my brevity.
Table of Contents
Open Table of Contents
Who am I?
My name is Drake, but I go by DrakeAFK online. If you are not up to date with internet slang, AFK stands for “Away From Keyboard”. It’s sort of a joke, albeit a bad one, to use AFK as a suffix to my name because I am a programmer and spend a lot of time at my keyboard. At the time of writing, I am 28 years old and a self-taught developer primarily focusing on web development (although I am currently making strides to venture outside of the webdev world). Currently, I work as a freelance web developer and an IT administrator at Universal Orlando Resort. Apart from programming, I spend a lot of time outdoors - hiking, cycling, rock climbing, and swimming. Living in central Florida, there’s a lot of opportunities to get outside and enjoy the weather. I also spend a fair amount of time playing video games, particularly Escape from Tarkov, the Hitman series, and driving/racing + flying simulators (iRacing, Microsoft Flight Simulator, etc).
First Introduction to Coding
I first got into programming at a fairly early age, pretty much by accident. I was around 13 years old, and Grand Theft Auto IV was released with an online mode. I hadn’t yet got into PC gaming so I was playing on my Xbox 360. I discovered that there was a whole community of people who would join communities and RP in private lobbies, essentially playing a glorified version of cops and robbers. I searched the web and found a few that looked like they would be fun to join, but they all had a common issue for me in that you had to be at least sixteen or eighteen in order to sign up. Bummer. Being a thirteen year old in the middle of summer and living in a town with not much to do, I decided I’d spend my time creating my own RP community. I had no idea how to do this, but I was determined to figure it out. I started by searching the web for how to create a website. I found a few free website builders and started playing around with them. I quickly realized that I wanted more control over the website than these builders would allow, so I started searching for how to create a website from scratch. I found a few tutorials on HTML and CSS and started playing around with them. I was hooked. I spent the next few weeks learning HTML and CSS and creating a website for my RP community. I was able to get a few friends to join and we had a blast. I figured out how to create a forum and allow potential members to sign up and apply to join. All was well and I was pretty proud of myself. I started making YouTube videos of the RP sessions as a way to advertise the community and gain new people. But, that also attracted the attention of some involved with the creation of more well-known RP communities at the time. I didn’t think this was a bad thing, and looking back it probably was not. But, being a young kid, when I created the community and posted the “rules” for the sessions, I may or may not have copied some of the rules from the other communities, and allegedly used a lot of the same terminology. I knew nothing of what copyrights were at the time, and I didn’t think it was a big deal seeing as how I was not making any money off of this. But one day as I was on the bus from middle school to the high school campus where our parents would pick us up, I checked my email on my phone and saw that I had received a strong worded email from one of the creators of a different RP community. There were claims I had “stolen” their rules and terminology and that I was to cease and desist immediately. My first thought, “What the fuck is a cease and desist?“. A quick Google search had me, a now fourteen year old, scared shitless. I had no idea if their claims held any merit or if they could actually do anything, but I didn’t care, it scared the hell out of me. As soon as I got home, I deleted the entire YouTube channel used to promote my RP community, and deleted all traces of the website and forum. Looking back, I’m sure whoever sent the email had no idea they were telling that to some young kid who had no idea what they were doing. And now, I look back on it and find it quite humorous. Of course, by that time I had already found a love for coding and building things that were entirely my own. So from then on I just made sure to not build something that was “heavily influenced” by things that other people had built. Except for my Python calculator, that kind of shit was obviously fair game.
First Real Job
I’ve been taking programming seriously for around half a decade now. Sure, I’ve been familiar with various aspects of coding in my teen years, taken a few college courses in computer science, and played around with different technologies, but I didn’t start taking it serious until I got to the end of my college years. Around that time, we’ll say five years ago, I decided that I wanted to find a way to make a career out of it. During college I worked as an IT support intern for a small company. I was basically just the “IT guy” someone would call when their computer wouldn’t connect to the internet. I enjoyed that type of role, and still do, but I wanted to transition away from being the “IT guy”. I started building different little projects to show on my GitHub and portfolio and spent hours and hours sharpening my skills. Shortly after finishing college, I was contracted as a junior frontend developer (a role where a junior was actually expected to produce junior level work and not know everything out of the gate). It was great, there wasn’t a TON expected of me in terms of delivering groundbreaking products or mastering X, Y, and Z in two days. It allowed me to learn a ton, on my own and from others, and gain invaluable real-world experience as a developer. I ended up working that same role for a few years, taking on more and more responsibility. While working with that company, I started picking up gigs building small, simple websites for local businesses.
Freelancing
I started searching businesses locally and in various places that did not have much of an online presence. I would create a spreadsheet, grouping similar businesses together and create a few different templates to build off of. I would then send out emails to the businesses in the spreadsheet, offering to build them a website for a small fee. I would get a few responses, and a few of those would turn into clients. I would build them a website, usually just a few pages. I would also offer to host the website as well. I’ve been doing this for a few years, and it has been a great way to learn about managing a business and what goes into it. I have learned how to communicate with clients and how to manage my time.
IT Consultant
During 2023, I accepted a contract as an IT consultant. I was responsible for managing the IT infrastructure, managing the workstations, and network infrastructure. I was also responsible for managing the backups and disaster recovery plans. I actually had a fair amount of free time during this role that allowed me to be able to continue learning and building new projects to get better as a developer. Plus, this role also has given me more professional experience in the IT world, which I consider to be a plus.
Today (October 2023)
At the end of my contract as an IT consultant (only a few months ago), I relocated to central Florida. I am still taking on freelance web development gigs here and there, but nothing too serious or large as I don’t want to be tied down to a project for months. I have been applying to many different developer positions, but given the current state of the tech world it has been quite difficult (most job postings on LinkedIn have hundreds if not thousands of applicants LUL) - so I have also been applying to IT positions as well. I recently accepted a position as an IT administrator at Universal Orlando Resort. My supervisors are aware that this position is not necessarily what I want to be doing and they have offered nothing but support. They have encouraged me to continue learning and working on projects and have even offered to help me find a position within the company that is more aligned with my career goals. I am very grateful for this opportunity and I am excited to see where it takes me.
DrakeAFK Blog
Why I Made This Blog
Why the fuck would someone start a blog in 2023, that ship has sailed.
I haven’t started this blog for anyone other than myself. If someone reads a post and finds it useful or interesting, that’s cool. But I really made it for myself. If I learn something new, and write a post about it, it will just help me retain the knowledge or learn more about it (I think of it like the rubber duck method of debugging - reading code out loud - this is my version of telling someone about a thing I learned and learning more about it in the process).
What to Expect
The majority, if not all, of the posts on this blog will be about tech in some form or fashion. Could be something about a project that I’m working on or learning, or some kind of change to my tech setup (hello new gaming PC??), or even something I’ve added that improves my workflow (I really want that standing desk). But if there’s something non-tech that I find interesting and want to write about, that may appear on here as well.
Conclusion
Fucking hell that certainly was not brief as intended. But, if you’re reading this, I hope you enjoyed it. I wanted to share a little about me in this introduction to the blog. I didn’t write much about the actual projects I have been working on or done in the past, or the tech I use, that wasn’t the purpose of this post. Those types of post will come soon enough, maybe even later tonight if I want to avoid things I should be doing :)