About me A little biography about me

cropped-cropped-IMG_20140529_041356.jpgWelcome, I am Ugonna Okoli. The summary of my biography as can be seen on my social media pages is “Naturally an artist, professionally a computer scientist, techpreneur, I love music. Jesus is Lord.” Yeah that is all you need to know, but if you desire an explicit biography, then continue to the next paragraph.

Naturally, I love the fine art. I know most kids generally like to draw, but I believe my interest then as a kid was different in a way that I drew on almost everything that had a surface, even under the dining table (if you don’t think that is extreme, well I don’t know what is ;-). This early artistic curiosity helped build up my general creativity in life. As I grew older, I discovered I had passion for creating things  as far as it involved stretching my mind to think and using my hands to put things together. I became the handy man in the family that built things and fixed all broken items. This also made me a scrap collector; I had up to 3 cartons of scrap electrical and electronic components at the corner of the wardrobe. At a point, I was not really into drawing as much until I discovered the secret to various pencil grades, types of papers and a technique of shading, I picked up drawing again and practiced on human portrait art works, created my portfolio and freelanced portraits for people even for my lecturers at the university.

Professionally, I studied computer science at the university. In secondary school, I knew I wanted to study computer science because I liked the concept of programming. Back then I was just using the computer as an application user, but I wanted to have more control and a broader platform for expressing my creativity, so I studied computer science and graduated from being an application user to becoming a system user. In the university, the programming courses seemed natural to me. While in school, I built and hosted complete web services from scratch which included a CMS called divineagle.org and a social network called eyrienet.com, which was intended to put facebook out of business – lol… it is funny thinking about it now, well it had about a hundred registered users before I let it rest in peace. The early drive was only a preparation for the future I must say. Presently, I am a full stack developer with experiences in creating software using various programming languages and their respective technologies in backend servers, frontend clients; browsers and mobile devices. My development stack is listed in StackShare. In summary, my collective skills and experiences have influenced my interest towards user experience design (UX design). Let me quickly demystify that UX design is beyond moving pixels, creating assets and making layouts look good, it largely involves code base too; good knowledge of the technology to use, understanding of the deployment platforms, and research.

I consider myself an entrepreneur in the technology industry. I have a history of freelancing, currently working in an IT company and planning towards starting operations in my registered company after acquiring adequate experience.

I would say, music didn’t come naturally to me, but over the years I picked interest in music and musical instruments from the small congregational church I was once part of. My interest was ignited when the church needed a keyboardist, so I volunteered to learn and play, ever since I have taught myself theory of music, piano, bass and lead guitar. My Anglican background has also made me love classical music and I wish to know how to sight read better someday.

The reality of life is the truth in knowing who you are, knowing the purpose of your existence and living each day in reverence to God. I am a christian, I know Jesus Christ is Lord.