About Me

My name is Hugo Dorfling and I was born on the 15th of March, 1995 in South Africa.

Since the day I had the privilege to lay my hands on a computer I have been passionate about solving problems and expressing myself through technology.

I was 13 when I started freelancing and designing professional logo's, websites, banner ads, business cards and more.
At 14, I was so proud to buy myself a Wacom Bamboo tablet as an investment into greater quality and freedom in my design work.

I developed my own portfolio website that same year (hugodorfling.com) turning my PSD design into HTML & CSS.

I also designed t-shirts for my high school's athletes.

After diving into web development I was certain that programming next on my list to master.
My artistic drive however made me pickup a guitar as well...

At high school, in the subject Information Technology, I was exposed to the Delphi programming language (an object oriented language) and SQL where the fundamentals of programming was laid strong in my intellectual foundations.

I also fell in love with making music and joined the church band, where I became the worship leader of the youth church.

We were such a dynamic creative team at our youth church and I dabbled in video editing, as well as building props from my designs used in church and many more.

Just before turning 18, I had the opportunity to go to Chiang Mai in Thailand, to a school for creatives in christian ministry, to play guitar and sing for two weeks.

This led up to an increasing motivation to pursue a life in christian ministry as I was deeply moved to find purpose and meaning in life.

I finished high school (in 2013) with all seven of my subjects 80% and above, higher grade Mathematics (80%) with the electives: Physical Sciences (86%), Information Technology (92%) and Accounting (95%).

Instead of continuing to pursue my passion in technology after school,
I focused on first establishing a strong sense of self and to develop my worldview.

I got the opportunity to start as a youth coach at a high school (2014), working with youth to mediate between psychologists and social workers, counselling and teaching life skills.

I did a lot of work redesigning the Christian Activity framework at the school, painted walls, created videos and constant social media art. We even held a fantastic launch event with a full band, lights and I preached my heart out. It was a fantastic experience.

The following year I got a job as a Youth Pastor and started the youth church where I redesigned the logo, printed banners and merchandise. I created marketing material, from videos to flyers and held an event inviting parents to share the vision and strategic plan for the cirriculum and activities of youth church.

This was such a great opportunity for me but it was super challenging as I had not received a salary from the church but instead had to raise funds to sustain myself with a sponsorship model. We had youth camps and went on mission trips to Botswana and much more...

I continued to preach, focusing on life skills which I have learnt throughout my life and inviting guest speakers to share stories.

There was however a growing voice in my mind, getting louder and louder - something was still missing...

I knew that I absolutely love coming up with solutions to problems in order to make the world a better place.
I felt unequipped however to practically deal with the issues I was wanting to solve and I knew that technology is the key to unlocking my full potential.

I tried creating a cross platform mobile application using Xamarin and C# and rediscovered my love for creating solutions and innovations through the art of programming.

I decided to switch careers and pursue studies in BCom Informatics which was the perfect harmony between business and information technology.

I was invited to the Investec Bursary Selection Programme but unfortunately didn't receive the bursary. I reached out to a friend of mine's father and he sponsored me to study so I can try to apply for bursaries using my first year university marks.

My knack for people and systems as well as a passion for software made me breeze through the first semester at University of Pretoria with the following marks: Financial Accounting 111 (89%), Information systems 113 (87%), Business Management 114 (86%), Statistics 110 (85%), Informatics 154 (84%), Economics 110 & 120 (72%).

C# was the programming language of choice for this degree with SQL database focus, but the main specialization was in systems analysis and design.

I also adopted a much more open-minded view of the world and started exploring many different viewpoints and religions in order to learn and grow.

I reached a point where I was overwhelmed with the complexity of trying to grasp at understanding the universe, the world we live in and my deep inner battles.

I was also frustrated in the cookie-cutter approach of universities and wanted to start building real world experience as I felt I need to explore what exactly I want to specialise in through working.

I also didn't want to sit with huge amounts of student debt and waste my financial sponsor's money. I left university at the start of the second semester exam. (Something I would look back at with some regret but I have definitely proven to myself that real world and practical application of theory solidifies understanding and gives context to studies.)

I started off in the networking world as a Wireless Field Technician at Bronberg Connect (WISP) (Oct 2018) .

I then moved into an IT Support Engineer role at ProtechIT (Dec 2018) and got my CompTIA A+ and N+ certifications.

I then was fast tracked into a Product Success Manager role at a startup called Howler (Jul 2019).

I reported to the Product Owner, working closely with the development team and the rest of the business.

I was exposed to the full SDLC, an agile workflow and gained tremendous experience of what it takes to ship production ready solutions and adapt to real world challanges.

I was the tech lead on the Cashless Product, which entailed an Android Application for RFID cashless transactions and an administration portal built on Ruby on Rails.

This exposure to working closely with the developers, identifying bugs, eliciting requirements from stakeholders, ideating with the team and writing out user stories sparked a fire in my heart.
This was what I want to be doing, this was the team I want to be on.

I realised that each and every role in the product team interested me, product management, design, development and QA.
I soon formulated my plan, made my decision and in February of 2020, I left Howler to pursue my dream to become a world-class software developer!

I decided to try and get into the tuition-free coding university called WeThinkCode (based on 42.fr) as some of the developers I was working with got their foot in the software industry through their programme.

I was bound to go through selection bootcamp in March but with Covid-19 and lockdowns, this was delayed to June 2020. I realised that in order to survive till then, i'll have to quickly sharpen up my web development skills and start sustaining myself again through freelancing.

I started off with freeCodeCamp.org, revising HTML and CSS. I also started learning JavaScript and because my fundamentals was laid strong I found it extremely intuitive and easy.
I just got used to the latest developments in programming and sharpening up my Algorithms and Data Structure knowledge.

I joined Leetcode, CodeWars and Hackerrank to start practicing to solve problems regularly.
I received my 'Responsive Web Design' and 'JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures' certificates from freeCodeCamp.org and I was hooked.
I jumped into the React framework for front end development using Redux, learnt NodeJS using Express and MongoDB.

I was really impressed at the advancements in web technologies and realised the potential of single page web apps and the potential of serverless.
I also dived straight into Linux, Unix shell scripting and C Programming to further grow my knowledge of how things work on the lower level and understand key operating system fundamentals.

Preparing for the selection bootcamp which was fully focused on the C programming language, I arrived more than prepared and aced the exams and the challenges thrown at me.

WeThinkCode offered my a full-tuition bursary along with stipend per month, but unfortunately I was not able to sustain myself to study full-time even with the assistance.

I started looking at the job market and saw a tremendous demand for C# and ASP.NET. I wanted to check out what the fuss was all about and soon realised the extreme increase of productivity, managability of code, potential for test driven development and the advancements from the Microsoft team.
I was quickly up and running with ASP.NET Core MVC and quickly explored the Angular framework with TypeScript as I saw this was the most sought after combination. I have got to say it was love at first sight and it felt extremely natural to me as the workflow made sense and seemed like my best bet to invest and specialise in.

I'm also an avid gamer and the potential for developing games with Unity and C# is another reason why I am super excited to continue to master my skills and grow in this direction.