Mauricio Urrego

Remember the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s? If you think about it long enough you can almost hear the low bit-rate royalty free music playing in the eye-catching and repeating background.

As you add a tick to the perfectly centered visitor counter and think about which handle you will choose for your soon to be new favorite internet forum, you remember that the internet is not the way it used to be. This wacky and colorful wild west of a world is the turn of the century that I grew up in and that the internet thrived on. I would install my games in parts using multiple floppy drives, and my computer monitor was as deep as the many possibilities the internet would soon bring. I remember wow-ing my classmates because I found a tool that let you build a website using templates and actually get it published in real time. A megaphone this large and vibrant for just some regular kids going to school? Not even going to question it. This was my first experience with web development (if you can call it that) and as you can see by my role at netzstrategen it certainly was not my last.

I became interested in technology from a very young age. My parents took note of this and sent me one summer, when I was 10, to a camp to study robotics. I programmed sensors for a custom robot using Java and fell in love with the complex simplicity of it all. Much like the internet, the world of computer science is a web of many disciplines. When beginning to understand one of its many facets you soon realize just how vast of a world it can be.

Feeling that I spent too much time growing up in front of a computer monitor I decided to study something outside of my comfort zone that I wanted to get more familiar with. This turned out to be the world of marketing, economics, and of course, what is tying it all together now, Information Systems. So what I thought would be a break from technology led me right back to where I started, learning about logic gates and assembly, I studied Information Systems at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University of Chicago. After taking this detour and working at a company called ACCO Brands, using SQL and Python on a daily basis and working in their backend databases, I decided to take a deep dive back to my roots.

It was certain that tech was the path for me because when I tried to deviate from this path I ended up right back in it, with a keyboard in hand and a terminal in front of me. So knowing this confidently, I decided to hone in on my web development skills by learning in depth the languages of the web: Javascript, PHP, and of course HTML, CSS, and every other little piece that I needed to know to bring it all together like the command line and git. With these skills equipped I found my first steps in freelancing working on small sites here and there and making a living. It felt a bit lonely though and I didn’t see my skills really improving very much on my own so I continuously looked for others to work with.

I worked for a small agency in Florida but where I think I really found my footing is here at netzstrategen. Here I really feel like I am learning something new every single day and I do not see myself stagnating again any time soon. I love every part of what goes into making a great web experience and having a team to share the process with is probably the most rewarding thing in my life right now. I’m happy to be a strategian and I am very much looking forward to what is coming next.