Andre Faca· Licensed to Geek ·

My first adventure with programming was back in 1999 when I developed a unique gaming script, aimed at groups of players (also known as clans) that needed to communicate on a daily and constant basis.

Fun fact: The script got so popular amongst clans that the early BETA (which was password-protected) was cracked within a week of its release.  As much as I was shattered, I ended up learning one of the fundamental rules to code for a living - protect your code.

Unfortunately, I have lost the source code for UTScript many years ago (2003?) when one of my IDE (now PATA) hard drives died. Backups weren't my forte back then neither.

Registered my very first domain name and also purchased a web hosting account!

In 2001 I was 17, so I didn't have a credit card yet.
Fortunately for me, this was indeed 2001 and there were still quite a few consumers that didn't feel comfortable entering their information into a web page. Alas, offline payment methods were usually available. 

I ended up paying through Western Union, and kept the receipt for at least 10 years. The company was based off of Hong Kong, and that might have been the very first purchase I ever made online.

The domain name was adjkdesign.com, and I kept it for the following 3 years. The domain was used to promote my web services, which included web hosting shortly after. This also allowed me to expand my knowledge in PHP while building the infrastructure. 

To give you an idea of how long ago this was, the stable version of PHP at the time was v4.

By the end of this adventure, I had my own online business, with a custom built CRM system (very rough but did the job!) and a small number of clients to take care of - some of which still turn to me for consulting.

The problem I had with having an online business, is that suddenly I had no domain name to host my projects on. I registered andrefaca.com and placed a small index page with links pointing to external documents - those were my "landing pages" back in the day.

Selling web services in the late 90s and early 2000s wasn't as easy as it is today. People weren't accostumed to reading long pages of text on a screen (remember, CRTs) and paper ended up being a more effective (not practical) to promote your services. Most people didn't know how to manage ther own email account, let alone share a link. There were no social networks, and the closest things to it were nowhere as accepted by the general public (eg: IRC).

It's around 11AM and my sister wakes me up, franctic, saying that "there's someone from the US on the phone". 
It was LunarPages' then-CTO, who tested my knowledge right there on the phone (in 2003 there weren't reliable video chat services - there was simply no bandwidth available for such a thing).

I was then offered a job there as a Jr System Administrator and stayed at the company for about a year, after which I have decided to move to HostGator.com.

Even though I was happy at LunarPages, I didn't feel like I was progressing enough, so I started to look for alternatives. Eventually I got to HostGator's then-CEO, who offered me a job right away - but this time as sort of an "Advanced" LiveChat Operator.

I was basically a Live-L2 (Level 2) before that term was invented.
As time moved on and great feedback showered from clients, I was very well taken care of and recognized within the company.

At one point, HG introduced an incentive for quality and productivity. These levels were Rookie, Guru and Elite. I have always been on the latter group and as such was well known within the company.

Disclaimer:
HostGator.com has been acquired by EIG in 2008 and I have never worked for the current management team.

Referred by a friend of mine, I was contacted by Appliedi.net in order to reinforce their 24/7 support coverage.

I have worked for Appliedi.net for 4 years and still maintain a very good relationship with its CEO and staff.

In 2010 and following a change in ownership, Site5.com was looking to reinforce their technical expertise. I was then invited by Site5.com's CEO to join Site5's Level 2 support team.

From there, I was eventually promoted to Technical Manager, and given the title of Senior Support Manager down the road.

In 2017, WWWH and all its brands have been sold to EIG (Endurance International Group), which caused me to take a forced break of a few months. I was then given the opportunity to work for A2 Hosting.

Throughout many interactions with the team in general; I was promoted to a Lead System Administrator within less than a year.

I have joined Kinsta's team in 2019 and am a happy Kinstanian!