Hey there, thanks for dropping by!

I'm Abdurashid. You may call me Ricky, too

I'm a Software Engineer and AI Product Lead with a unique background in law and international trade. My journey from legal studies to coding has equipped me with strong analytical skills and a practical approach to building clear, reliable digital products. I'm also an AWS Certified Developer with experience across agentic AI, fullstack development, and cloud delivery.

My Journey

When I was studying at school and at an academic lyceum, I was very curious about technical things, phones, and all of the digital technologies back then. I used to have a Nokia phone, and there were some website constructors, like lark.ru or wap.su, and those would help to build a very basic website in their subdomains, like something.lark.ru or something.wap.su. Those were not very customizable, and not at a level I could be proud of. But still, those were maybe my first experience trying to create a website, and it was around 2012 or '13. Even before that, I was very interested in building some kind of websites.

Then, when I was studying at Tashkent State University of Law, in the first year at the university, we had this subject called IT for Lawyers, and I was first introduced to IT programming, like the HTML and CSS concepts, back then in 2015. It was really interesting for me. I even started inspecting different websites in Google Chrome and tried to learn their HTML formats, and tried to replicate their websites with my own multi-page HTML websites. After that, we had more classes related to IT for lawyers at the university, and the further tasks, like system analysis for lawyers, which was similar to using some IT concepts in the legal sphere, were also interesting, but at the same time a little bit not interesting, as those were not about creating something.

Then one day in 2017, I saw an article on a news website of Uzbekistan called Kun.uz that was about AI, particularly. There was an AI model in London, and that AI model apparently had better conclusions and findings than London's best lawyers. At the time, I thought, wow, this might be the future. Working with AI may offer a better future than practicing law. That was one of the big sparks that increased my interest in programming as well.

Even before coming to Korea for the master's degree, I was considering whether I needed to study IT or something closer to law. My major in the master's degree ended up being international logistics, or supply chain management.

After finishing the master's degree, I wanted to find a job in Korea. I tried applying for jobs related to international trade, marketing, and international logistics, but I did not get many interviews. After that, I started thinking that if I learned IT and programming as a field, I would be able to work with my existing experience in Korea, in Uzbekistan, or in any other country I might visit in the future. At the time, I thought it would be much easier to find a job in IT than in international logistics or international trade. So I dedicated around 6 or 7 months to learning the basics of programming deeply, and started going to meetups regularly to get to know the people who do programming, and the people who have the job that I wanted to have, in order to ask them some things, and sometimes in the hope that maybe there would be someone who might hire me. And sometimes just out of boredom.

Time passed, and I started applying for jobs. After so many job applications without even being invited to an interview, I finally started to get some job interviews when I fully translated all of my documents, website, portfolio, CV, and cover letter into Korean. One of those companies hired me as a programmer, and I started to work for that company. It was Geosoft. I worked at that company and learned lots of things: learned how to work with people, especially Korean people, learned how to work until 10, 11 late at night with the team, also learned better Korean and making jokes in Korean. Although, from a foreigner's outside perspective, it may seem difficult for Koreans to accept outsiders into their circle, I realized that it is not so difficult if you try to learn the language and embrace their culture to some extent while keeping your values.

I worked for some time at that company, and after that I worked at a second company, where I also got promoted to team leader after some time. And now I've been working for a couple of companies. One of them is Habsida, which is an online programming learning academy in Korea, and I'm a full-stack programming teaching mentor there for Uzbek students. At the same time, I also work on some projects as a freelance developer.

On top of those things, these days I think that, as a developer or programmer, one of the best ways of increasing your income, while also getting the enjoyment of building, is building something you want, something that solves the problems and issues you are facing, and at the same time solves those issues for all the other people facing the same issues. Therefore, I started to be an indie hacker and have tried to build several apps and websites. These days I'm trying to promote them, continue building on top of what I've already built, and learning lots of things during this journey.