Hi, It's Me, Yohanes Rio Irsan

A Little Introduction

Hello guys, welcome to my blog!

My name is Yohanes Rio Irsan, and I thought I'd share a little story about myself. Not that I'm anyone special, lol. But in case you're curious about who I am and how I ended up here, well, here goes.

Growing Up in Makassar

I was born and raised in Makassar, Indonesia. I did all my schooling there, from elementary school all the way through college.

I grew up in a pretty average middle-class family. We weren't rich, but we weren't poor either. My father was a university lecturer, and back then, my mother worked as a nurse at a senior high school in Makassar.

My First Computer

My interest in computers started really early, probably when I was still in kindergarten. I was lucky enough to have a computer at home because my father owned one, so I got to mess around with it whenever I had the chance.

Of course, by "mess around," I mostly mean playing games. Counter-Strike 1.6, Condition Zero, GTA: Vice City, Alien Shooter, a bunch of GameHouse games, you name it.

Looking back, I probably wouldn't recommend letting a kindergarten kid play that many violent games, lol.

Funny enough, I learned how to type my own name before I even knew how to read properly. My uncle still brings it up sometimes. He'd say something like, "Whenever I came over to your house, you were always sitting at the computer. I'd walk up and ask you to show me how you typed your name."

I guess computers were already my thing, even if I had no idea what I was doing.

How Game Cheats Led Me to Blogging

I first got curious about coding in junior high school, and weirdly enough, it all started with looking for video game cheats.

Back then, PS2 rental shops were everywhere in my area. I already had a PS2 at home, but hanging out and playing at a rental shop was a completely different experience. It was just more fun somehow.

People would bring printed cheat codes and walkthroughs to those shops. GTA: San Andreas cheats, Downhill Domination cheats, Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks fatality combos, all that good stuff. My school friends were always searching for them online too.

One day, while I was browsing for cheats, I noticed that a bunch of websites had addresses ending in .blogspot.com or .blogspot.co.id.

I remember thinking, "Wait, what even is Blogspot?"

That one question led me to Blogger. I followed its step-by-step setup guide and made my first blog.

The name? yohanes-ps2-skabel.

"Skabel" was short for my school's name. My brilliant plan was that one of my school friends would search for a cheat code, accidentally find my blog, and go, "Yo, did you make this website?"

Yeah, that never happened. Hahaha. 😂

Making My Blog Look Cool

Somewhere along the way, I completely forgot why I'd made the blog in the first place. I wasn't even that interested in impressing my friends anymore.

I just wanted my blog to look cool.

Other people's blogs had background music, fancy layouts, and text that followed your cursor around. Meanwhile, mine looked pretty basic. Obviously, I wanted all those cool things too.

So I started searching for tutorials on how to change a Blogger background. When I finally figured it out, I was ridiculously happy. Wkwkwk.

After that, I changed my background almost every day. My favorites were Kamen Rider Ryuki and Super Saiyan 2 Gohan. Peak design taste, if you ask me, lol.

Eventually, I found websites offering free Blogger templates. I started swapping templates constantly because I'd get bored looking at the same layout.

But then another question popped into my head: "What if I made my own template?"

My curiosity basically went from changing a background, to installing templates, to wanting to build an entire template myself.

My First Lines of HTML

While searching for ways to make my own template, I stumbled across a website-building tutorial on a web hosting provider's site.

The article explained HTML from scratch, and I remember following along with it step by step. I opened Notepad and typed something along these lines:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Yohanes Rio Irsan</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Yohanes Rio Irsan</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Then I opened the file in my browser and saw my name on the screen.

Dude. I felt like a hacker.

I'd typed all those weird symbols by hand, and somehow the browser understood them. It was such a simple thing, but at the time, it felt amazing.

Then Gaming Took Over

Unfortunately, my interest in web development didn't exactly stay consistent.

During junior high school, I got really into Point Blank. Then, in high school, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive completely took over my life.

I spent so much time gaming that I basically forgot about building websites. Instead, I started dreaming about becoming a professional esports player.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention something. I'm the youngest of five siblings, and one of my older brothers is actually a programmer. He's now working as an IT Manager.

I remember back in high school, i had a subject called Basic Web Programming. I found it pretty easy since I already knew the basics from all those years of messing around with Blogger and HTML.

One day, my brother was using my computer and happened to see one of my web programming assignments. After looking at it, he suggested that I should learn more about web development through W3Schools.

Did I listen to him? Oh, absolutely not, lol.

At that point, my only concern was finishing my assignments as quickly as possible so I could get back to playing CS:GO. Learning more about web development wasn't exactly on my priority list.

Oh, and here's the funny part. He was actually the one who bought me my CS:GO key back when the game wasn't free to play yet, hahaha.

So yeah, the same person who encouraged me to take programming more seriously was also the person who helped fuel my gaming obsession. Pretty ironic, right?

I reached Global Elite in CS:GO and FACEIT Level 10. Back then, those ranks felt like a huge deal to me, and they made me want to take competitive gaming even more seriously.

College, CS:GO, and eSports

By the time I got to college, I already knew some basic coding. But my attitude was pretty much, "Eh, it's the same old stuff."

I did my assignments, studied for exams when I had to, and didn't really explore programming outside of class. My main goal was just to graduate as quickly as possible.

Somehow, I still graduated with really good grades, considering how much of my time I spent playing games, lol.

But if I'm being fair to myself, I didn't make the most of college when it came to developing my technical skills. Most days were just practice, class, sleep, and repeat.

So, did I actually become a pro player?

Well, kind of. Just not at Tier 1.

From high school through college, I played under Pandora Sports, which was arguably one of the biggest esports organizations in Makassar at the time. That was my first experience having proper boot camp facilities. The five of us could practice there three times a week.

It felt like I was finally getting closer to the dream.

From CS:GO to Valorant

Eventually, Valorant came along, and the competitive scene around CS:GO started changing.

That probably would've been the perfect moment to revisit web development. But nope. I decided to switch to Valorant instead, lol.

Since I already had a CS:GO background, I figured adapting to Valorant wouldn't be too difficult. And honestly, I still wanted to see how far I could go in esports.

After graduating from college, I finally got paid to play games.

I joined an esports organization called Lotus Gaming as a Valorant player. My salary was Rp1.8 million per month, per person.

After spending around seven years chasing the dream, I finally got an actual paycheck from gaming. Pretty funny that it only happened after I graduated, right?

Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned.

Why I Stopped Chasing Esports

Five months after I joined Lotus Gaming, the team disbanded because of frequent salary delays.

One of my teammates suggested that we keep playing without getting paid while waiting for another offer. I thought about it, but I started looking at things more realistically.

Even if another offer came along, the salary might've been the same or even lower. It was already well below the minimum wage. On top of that, Valorant had moved toward a partnered league system, making the path to Tier 1 even harder.

And to be honest, I'd already experienced the one thing I'd been curious about for years: what it felt like to get paid to play video games.

Seven years of trying, five months of getting paid. Not exactly the greatest return on investment, lol.

So I decided to stop pursuing esports professionally.

I still loved gaming, of course. I just didn't want to keep treating it as my career plan.

Finding My Way Back to Coding

After leaving competitive gaming behind, I realized how much I'd missed while I was focused on esports.

So I enrolled in a Frontend Engineer coding bootcamp to catch up.

And man, that was an eye-opener.

I used to think web development was mostly HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. Then suddenly I was learning about frameworks, CI/CD, development workflows, and a bunch of other terms I'd barely heard of before.

At first, I genuinely felt left behind.

But something good happened during that bootcamp. The same curiosity I had as a kid, the one that made me spend hours changing Blogger backgrounds and figuring out HTML in Notepad, started coming back.

I began exploring things on my own again, not just because I had assignments to finish, but because I actually wanted to understand how things worked.

It reminded me why I liked computers in the first place.

So, Here I Am

Looking back, my journey has been all over the place.

I went from being a kid playing Counter-Strike on my father's computer, to making a blog about PS2 cheats, to messing with HTML, to spending years chasing an esports career, and eventually finding my way back to web development.

I don't regret the gaming years. They gave me experiences, friendships, and stories I probably wouldn't have had otherwise. But I'm also glad I found my way back to something I was curious about long before I even knew what a software engineer was.

And yeah, that's pretty much my story so far.

Thanks for reading, especially if you somehow made it all the way down here, lol.

See you around!