About Me & Programming Journey

8th Grade

The beginning of my programming journey was in 8th grade — a Discord bot written in JS following a tutorial. The bots in the discord fasinated me and I wanted to make my own, but with actual code from scratch. It was simple and broke constantly. The codebase was a developer's nightmare, but it was my first real experience with programming and I loved watching my bot respond to commands in real time.

10th–11th Grade

By 10th and 11th grade I'd moved to C# and Unity, trading small bot scripts for simple mini games — engines, physics, state, all of it. That's really where I learned to think in systems without knowing it. Instead of the old simple tutorials, I mostly was recreating simple child hood games under the name Space High Gaming. The name sparked from my love for space and games.

After Graduation

after graduation I got serious about programming and wanted a professional career in it. I taught myself everything from there. No bootcamp, no CS degree — just documentation, broken project deployments, and enough courage to fix every annoying mistake or bug in the code, most of the time even staying up all night at 6AM debugging. Python became home for this since the reason I got into backend was to better my AI Engineering foundation later. which was funny because back in school, in my computer science class I thought Python was a joke and I would never use it because I was coding in C# at the time. I was very much wrong. Then portfolio projects to AWS: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS, KMS. I passed the AWS Certified Developer Associate and Cloud Practitioner exams on the first attempt, and eventually I shipped a fix upstream to SlowAPI, the rate-limiting library a lot of FastAPI projects depend on. All within months of being self-taught and a passion to build.

Now

Currently I run RaynerCodes Cloud Solutions — I've built a live booking and payment platform for a real paying client, a fintech loan lending project API, apparently my own portfolio website (which your looking at now), and my own B2B SaaS product, LeverageCut. I'm looking for a professional backend or cloud engineering role, with healthcare and fintech at the top of my list, because in those environments the backend actually has to be right, not just functional, which is something I priortize when building systems. Cybersecurity and AI engineering are very interesting to me and they are the skills to follow.