Me

Me with a red panda from the Wellington Zoo.

That's me, Emanuel Rabina - front-end developer at Upstock; writer and baker (and a whole host of other things I've failed to list) in my spare time - based in the tiny little country of New Zealand.

I'm a computer programmer by trade; my career having started in server-side Java development, though I now spend my days with everything HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I also do a bit of coding in my spare time, including a classic Command & Conquer remake project written in Groovy, occassional contributions to the Thymeleaf project, and a whole host of smaller projects, all of which you can find on my GitHub page.

The Site

Ultraq is an alias I use on the Internet, and the Final MooCow is an online portfolio for all my digital endeavours, as well as a good reason for me to keep my web development skills up-to-date.

Named after a text file that I used to keep tabs of all of my stuff, the site was first put up on the Internet in late 2000. Utilizing the now-much-hated HTML frames and littered with irrelevant images and semi-relevant quotes, the Final MooCow website was born. Like any humble beginning, my first hosting plan was one of those free ones that liked to violate the upper section of your pages by inserting an epilepsy-inducing advertisement. We all had to start somewhere right?

The shameful thing is that it stayed that way for several years. It followed me through high school and university, and was not my favourite bullet point in my CV. In my last year of university, I finally decided to do something about it - what self-respecting job hunter would want to be caught with such a website? Mid-2005 saw a new look, a paid-for hosting service, and the purchase of my own domain name: ultraq.net.nz

The job I managed to land later that year introduced me to far better ways to create websites than I had currently been doing. From it, my curiosity led me to stumble into the wonderful world of modern web design and development, and I've been surrounding myself in that world ever since.

This website is now my web design and development playground, receiving facelifts and tummy tucks every so often to align with the latest and greatest web practices, as well as my ever evolving tastes in design, aesthetics, my improvements in digital image editing, and my growing programming abilities.

If all these iterations have taught me anything, it's that there's always something new to learn, something new to do, something that I can add/take-away from this site to make it better. It's for that reason I've added the 'work-in-progress' moniker to the footer of this site since that is what The Final MooCow is: a constant work in progress.