About
General info
My name is Erik Jermaniš. I am a 24 year old software engineer with over 4 years of professional experience.
I live in Croatia.
How did I become a software engineer?
Early beginnings
Back when I was in kindergarten, we had a computer with a few old-school games installed on it. I always loved spending time on it, not just for playing games, but also for exploring everything else (mostly just clicking arround random menus). When my kindergarten teacher told my parents about my passion for computers, they decided to buy me a laptop. It was a bulky Asus laptop with Windows XP.
We had no internet access at home, but that didn't stop me from learning all about the computer and the software installed on it. I used to spend hours and hours playing Hamsterball and perfecting my score. Other than playing Hamsterball, my favorite activity was creating fictional documents and presentations in Microsoft Office 2003 programs. I actually learned how to use those programs without modern YouTube tutorials 
.
First encounter with programming
In high school, a professor introduced me to Python programming language. I immediately fell in love with coding. My first program wasn't the famous "Hello world!", but a program that takes two numbers as an input and outputs their sum.
After that first lesson, I took the book that we had, and started learning everything in advance by myself. Even before halfway through the school semester, I had gone through the entire book and learned everything that needed to be learned for that school year.
Start of professional career
While I was in college, I had a part-time job at a local print shop. One day, the owner told me that he would like to create a webshop for his print shop. An idea was born in my head 
. I spoke with my friend from college, and after a brief chat, we decided to co-found a small web dev company. My former boss became our first client.
Professional work
I specialize in web development and have spent most of my career working with JavaScript, particularly TypeScript. My primary focus has been on developing and maintaining front-end applications using React.
Even though I said that I specialize in front-end web development with React, I don't like the idea of calling myself a React developer because my skill set is much broader than the single JavaScript library. My experience also includes (but is not limited to):
Mindset
To me, code and software are nothing more than tools (which I really enjoy using) to achieve a higher goal. I love problem solving and building things. I approach every task with the bigger picture in mind. Effective communication and collaboration with clients, designers, business analysts, project managers and fellow developers are crucial components of my work process.