About Me

My name is Ekow Essel. I am originally from Ghana, West Africa. I moved to the United States when I was 12 years old and have lived here ever since.

A little bit about me and my love for technology. Ever since I was a little boy, I always had a knack for putting things together, especially electronic devices. It was something that was exciting to me to try to see how everything fit together to work. My family saw this desire in me and sometimes would challenge me to figure out how to configure and set up their devices they had just bought, without the use of any manuals and see how quickly I could do it.

This infatuation with technology and electronic devices of all sorts led me to choose a degree of Computer Science when it was time for me to head to college. I studied at Trinity University for 2 years, after which I transferred to the University of Texas at San Antonio, where I graduated from in December of 2012 with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Computer Information Systems. My degree in CIS enabled me to have a balance of learning business values and ethics, while still learning about programming in several languages such as Java, Visual Basic, and VB.Net. I felt this was a good mixture of subjects to help me be able to succeed in a business environment with the programming skills I was learning concurrently.

Since graduating, the learning has not stopped and neither do I plan on it ever stopping. I have learned new languages, programming techniques, as well as business skills  in the professional world which excites me and makes me yearn for more! There is an infinite amount of things to be learned when it comes to the computer/programming field I love and enjoy, and I plan on gaining as much of it as possible, one book, one website, one tutorial, and also one project at a time.

WEBSITES

Being able to work on raw code and see it develop into a lovely visual experience has always been something that has fascinated me! From learning Visual Basic to theming android to now learning PHP to build websites, I have enjoyed that experience, and building websites has helped me expand on that in many ways!

I first started with websites my junior year in college in my Database Administration class. It was one of the first websites that I had built that was actually live and on the internet. It was very basic html site and incorporated some tables from Microsoft Access. The site itself was built with a table format, which is now quite outdated.

My second full website and first venture into the use of CMS to develop websites and incorporating SEO was a newsletter site that I made for a photographer while working at Knifton Enterprises. This was a spur of the moment project, and before being handed that website project to do, I had never coded in PHP before nor ever used WordPress. However, once my boss was able to show me the basics, a whole new world was opened to me! I could not wait for the next website, and with that, I found I had found a new passion in programming, which was developing websites.

Since then I have built several other sites, with and without the use of Content Management Systems, and have learnt and am still learning so much about the ever changing and constantly advancing world of building websites, and I do not plan on ever stopping.

PROGRAMMING

From the moment, I built my very first ‘Hello World’ program in java, I knew that programming was the way for me. From when I was just a young boy, I had a desire to know exactly how things worked. And when I was able to debug my first program in Java and have it output the simple words, ‘Hello World’, I knew my mind was getting opened to something that would satiate that innate desire in me to finally know how things worked by being the one to build those things.

There is something fascinating about being able to develop something that, to the user of your program, website, or android theme in my case, would look quite simple. However, there is a peace one gets knowing that even if the user sees it that way, you know the intricate back end of that software. And knowing that it works and is able to make someone’s life easier or add something to someone’s business, just excites me and has always been a driving force behind my love for programming.

I have been able to learn several programming languages over the years from Java, Visual Basic, Visual Basic Access, HTML, PHP, CSS, to delving into C++. There best part is, there are so many more languages out there and so much more to learn and I can’t wait to delve into several more programming languages and increase my knowledge base and be able to help, not only myself, but whatever business I am a part of.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Customer service is not a mission statement of a company. It is my lifestyle. Putting a smile on someone’s face is the easiest way I find to put a smile on my face as well. No matter where I am or who I am with, you can always find a smile on my face!

Providing customer service is what spurred my CEO at Knifton Enterprises to move me from being just a developer, to being a sales representative after inviting me to a business meeting and being able to provide several leads.

Customer service is what helped me always have a part time job with Lowe’s during my school year and vacation days for 3 and a half years before finally starting to work full time with that company.

And customer service is what helps me to keep excelling, no matter what business I am in and no matter who I talk to. And I plan on delivering the best customer service and putting smiles on people’s faces for as long as I live!

Thank you for visiting my portfolio.