About

Hi, my name is Christian. I'm in my early 30s, and I was born and raised in New Jersey.

I went to Rutgers before dropping out and wandering around a bit in life — lost, not really knowing what to do. I worked a lot of different jobs. I was a janitor at Powerhouse Gym in the Galleria Mall in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was a server at World of Beer and Steakhouse 85 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I worked the front desk at the YMCA, I was a lifeguard, and at one point I even went door to door selling siding for houses — among many, many other jobs.

Eventually I got into photography and videography, part-time, offering to work for free for small businesses just to build my skills at making videos.

I was always someone who was interested in building things. A YouTube channel, a blog, whatever it was — I was always trying to create something.

At one point I had an idea for an app. I didn't know how to code, and I didn't know anything about software engineering. I went on YouTube, found a course called Code With Chris, and paid about $100 for it. From that course and a lot of Googling — this was back around 2017 or 2018 — I built an application called Interested.

It's down now, and at the time I didn't have the skills to take it to the next level. But I had built it. I got a couple of users. I even launched it at World of Beer — my friend was a manager there, and we offered 10% off beers if people signed up.

After the app, which I had built in my free time, I went back to my normal jobs.

By the time I was about 26 or 27, I decided I needed to make a change, because I could see my life going in a direction I didn't want it to go. The dreams I had seemed like they were never going to happen, and I felt like I was going to be working dead-end jobs for the rest of my life.

So I put myself back into college. I was living in Florida, and Florida International University was the only school that would let me change majors after transferring from Rutgers so many years later. Since I had that experience building an app, I studied computer science.

This time I had real drive, because I had seen what my life would become if I didn't change it. I put my all into it.

Long story short: some Google recruiters visited a class I was a TA for and invited us to a presentation. That presentation led to a resume, an application, and eventually an internship at Google. I did two internships there, and I've now been working there full-time for a handful of years. I graduated from FIU summa cum laude in computer science.

And now that I've achieved these things I'm so proud of — now that I've given myself financial stability — I'm back to creating the things I want to create in my free time. That's what this workshop is.

I hope you find the things I create here meaningful, useful, or both.

If anything here connects with you, touches you, or affects you, please reach out: hello@christianortiz.studio.

Thanks for reading, watching, subscribing, and using the things that I make.

Bye.