rubik.am/a

        I was born in Wimbledon, south London — home of The Championships — and
        lived there for approximately 5 years before moving across the river to
        Eastcote where I lived, grew up and went to school (where my
        year 11 ball was featured in The Independent).

        At the end of 2003, I created my first website, wackomenace (named after
        I used one of the then-common ninja name generator websites), using a
        prepaid card (Splash Plastic) and a friendly web host that accepted it
        (Purple Cloud). It soon grew to include a blog, tools and resources as
        well as some of my first open-source code.

        I quickly got into the then popular "blog scene" featuring such
        luminaries as (in no particular order) Matt Haughey, Anil Dash,
        Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Kottke, Eric Meyer, Mark Pilgrim, Cameron Barrett,
        Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, Douglas Bowman, Daniel Bogan and Shaun Inman,
        amongst others, taking design and development cues as the web quickly
        evolved. I was even one of the kottke.org micropatrons and Kickstarter
        backers for the reboot of Upcoming.org.

        In 2006, I went to university at the University of Reading where I got a
        degree in Computer Science. During that time, I worked for a year at
        the Microsoft Technology Centre in Reading.

        Around the end of 2008, wackomenace went offline as I migrated to more
        "respectable" domain names.

        My first job out of university was a Business Analyst at Shell on the
        graduate programme. I stayed with Shell for four-and-a-half years,
        working in a number of areas and it's also where I met my future wife.

        During this time, I also ran TwentyFourNine, a small web development
        agency, on the side. I was even one of the sponsors of BarCamp London 9.

        After this time, I decided that I wanted to get back into hands-on
        development and so left the comfort of a multinational company to
        move to orderswift, a small startup working in online food ordering.
        It was a change of industry and a massive change of pace and
        responsibility, doing everything from web development to hardware
        installation and customer service. I stayed for a year, but probably
        learnt about five years worth in the time!

        I was looking for something a little different at this point, and
        happened to come across the Government Digital Service. I liked the
        organisation, their work and their ways of working, so when the
        opportunity arose, I said yes with little hesitation. I spent three
        years working on various parts of GOV.UK, and in that time moved up to
        eventually become Lead Developer. I also, for the first time, carried
        out and led interviews and became a line manager. I had an
        Instagram story made about my work and blogged about
        the meaning of responsible building. The work gave me a real sense of
        purpose and I loved every moment of it.

        In 2019, having decided to move from London to Cornwall with my wife,
        and remote working still being something that wasn't universally accepted,
        I left GDS and London, and started work at Resolver as a Lead Developer,
        mostly remote but with three days a month in the office in London. I used
        to travel by train or plane and stay with my parents, but COVID-19 put an
        end to this regular commute. I worked on My Resolution Hub (previously
        Accord ODR), a new SaaS app aimed at dispute resolution providers. In
        addition, my wife and I took on the project management of our own
        self-build house from 2020.

        In April 2021, I moved to Hopin, where I worked as a Senior Backend
        Engineer, initially working on customer-facing analytics and latterly on
        experimental features for product growth. In May 2021, we moved to our
        newly-built house, and we’ve been finishing bits ever since.

        In July 2022, we bought our first puppy, Saffy, a Portuguese Water Dog,
        and have been training her and managing a hyper dog ever since!

        In November 2022, along with a lot of others, I was made redundant from
        Hopin, and in December 2022, our daughter Evie was born. I took some
        involuntary time off to look after her for a few weeks.

        In January 2023, I started working as a Ruby contractor, and I currently
        work for Office for Product Safety and Standards.
      

About this site

        This is the umpteenth iteration of my personal website. I've moved a
        number of times between hosting providers, technology stacks and having
        a blog versus a plain, low-maintenance landing page. You can find older
        iterations for my previous websites at ruben.arakelyan.uk, ruben.am,
        ra.me.uk, rubenarakelyan.com, rubenarakelyan.co.uk and
        twentyfournine.co.uk at the Internet Archive. In addition, most old URLs
        should still work because cool URIs don't change.

        I've deliberately kept this site as simple as possible with no bells
        or whistles. Just plain text.

        The current version of the site is created using Nova, stored on GitHub
        and hosted on Netlify.