This is me

Hi there, I’m Rafel Ballester Coll– Geographer and historian, spiritual knowledge seeker and technology enthusiast.

I’ve always been fascinated by the overall human experience, and its various activities, and this is how at a very young age, I was drawn to the wonders and history of Archaeology and Eastern Cultures, which inspired me to begin my academic career in the fields of Geography, History and Art History.

Eventually, that led me to the world of research, specializing in Anthropology of the Sacred and World Religions. To learn more about my publications, visit my Academia page on the Type section.

During this time, I also started my personal passion project, a virtual encyclopedia on Western Esotericism and related studies called Esoterika, which is the love of my life… second only to my wife Jessica, of course.

What makes me a great Web/Blockchain Developer and UX/UI designer?

Well, you see, my background in Humanities gave me the knowledge and experience needed to enter the publishing world, in which I have worked for the last 15 years in both digital and print.

After working in editorials, I discovered that design is everything; it facilitates access to the object. I mean, who hasn’t been bored by reading a book with small print? Wouldn’t redesigning that be a wonderful exercise in UX design?

So, taking advantage of my knowledge in design, I started my journey into the UX/UI world, and it became second nature to me, resulting in being professionally certified by Google.

And little by little I discovered that I was passionate about developing my own design proposals. This led me to study Web Development at UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) and fall in love with programming deeply. At the end of 2021 I made the decision to focus solely on my studies and until the end of 2023 I have been developing web applications 10 hours every day, which has given me a global vision of the current web landscape and its different trends. I have learned a lot during this time, although obviously I still want to learn a lot more.

I live on the magical island of Mallorca, so I love to get outside in nature any chance I get and enjoy spending time with my wife and my cats. In my free time, apart from enjoying nature, I have tried to cultivate my creative side by drawing and taking photographs, which I turned into my hobby a long time ago. My artistic experience was what led me to discover the Blockchain world, as I had already been selling my art as NFT on the Cardano Blockchain for some time. Evidently Blockchain development was my second stop in my learning during my years of study, which led me to start programming with Soliditi together with LearnWeb3.DAO and Alchemy University. And little by little I also learned how to develop in Cardano.