Raffi Räber presents: caminoreal.fi

Programming

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IBM Mainframe (Cobol & PL1):
I’ve been working with these two ancient languages for almost 30 years now. Mainly active in the banking industry, I’ve accumulated experience in sectors like accounting, pensionfunds and insurance as well. I’m a responsible, precise and reliable developer, who’s making sure everything’s working according to the specs before giving the green light for deploying my work. I put much emphasis on testing and documentation, which are very important parts in the big scheme of software development, really. I have worked in three different countries, for startups and worldwide companies, as a consultant, a freelancer (CaminoReal Consulting) and regular employee, in cross-technology teams using agile and waterfall methodologies as well as on and off the IBM host. Head over to my LinkedIn to find out more about my professional career.


Internet (HTML, CSS, MySQL, JavaScript & PHP):
When I started out developing fantasy games (2000), I had to use a programming language and databases suitable for the internet. I was already able to use HTML, which I had learned right at the beginning of the internet age. First I tried out ASP and Access databases, but that proved to be too much of a hassle. The better option was using PHP in combination with MySQL databases. This also worked much better for developing stuff on my own PC/Laptop, since it is really easy to set up a development environment on your own computer. Due to my job, I already had a lot of experience in the field of programming and PHP was fairly easy to learn. I still regularly develop online stuff using these technologies, like applications for following my investments or NBA scores, but only for my friends and my private use.


Online Fantasy Games:
My first huge project on the internet was bringing these type of virtual games to Europe. Having been very popular in the United States for a long time, they have yet to take a proper hold in Europe. Fantasy games are strategical online games, where you pick real life players for your team and they collect points according to their real life stats (like goals, assists, etc). I ran games for soccer, icehockey and american football, mostly with the fantasy points format, but some also with the pick’em format. Competitions included: European and World Championships (soccer); World Championships, Olympics, Swiss National League (icehockey); Finnish Maple League (american football).

Over the years the website just grew bigger and bigger, but due to limited time and money, the marketing effort was subobtimal. Therfore the page didn’t get the amount of regular users I had hoped for. Keeping these games up-to-date and submitting the stats regularly took a lot of time, and I felt that the balance between my effort and the number of users just wasn’t right. So I decided to stop developing fantasy games sometime in the mid-2000’s.
Last edited: 03 November 2023