About Me — Ray O’Hagan
Lives in NZ, originally from Ireland. Husband, father to 3, part time writer, full time programmer.
Whats your TLDR?
I was born in Ireland in the 70's, growing up in a town called Dundalk, just south of the border. I moved to Dublin in the 80's and attended Dublin City University, studying computer applications, which has been my career ever since graduating.
In 2004, I decided to take a career break and booked a year long trip around the world trip. Half way through I met an English woman on an overnight train from Bangkok to Vientiane, and we continued to travel together throughout Asia, finally arriving in New Zealand in 2005. NZ quickly became our home, we are now married with 3 children and living in Wellington.
My one year trip has so far lasted over 19 years.
Decades of living
70s
I grew up on a council estate in Dundalk, Ireland and lived there for most of the 70s. There were a lot of children my age in the estate, we would play football in the street a lot (this was well before cars started dominating the landscape), as well as cycling round the estate and back. Being outside all day was not unusual for all of us.
Sometime in the 70s I picked up a guitar for the first time. My father was musical, he played guitar and sang in local pubs, and I guess that started rubbing off on me somehow. I doubt what I tried back then sounded anything remotely musical, but it certainly gave me my initial love for music.
By the end of the decade I had a brother and a sister, and my parents had managed to scrape together enough to buy our own house across town. I missed the football, my friends, but it felt special to be in our own home.
80s
In the early 80s I started becoming fascinated with these new computers that were becoming available. My parents bought me a Vic 20 computer, which came with 5k of memory and, once I started writing my own programs for it, I was hooked. By the age of 12 I knew that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and by 1988 I was enrolled in the Computer Applications course in Dublin City University.
Around 14 years old, I picked up and old acoustic that had been lying around the house and, with a little help from my father, I learned the basic chords and from there I strived to figure the rest out for myself. It helped that my best friend at the time was an incredibly talented piano player. But once I heard the distinctive sounds of Z.Z. Top on the Eliminator album I made the switch to the electric guitar, and that’s where I found my true instrument.
90s
I graduated DCU in 1992, around that time not a lot of computer jobs were around in Dublin, so it wasn’t until mid 93 that I found full time work, but it was a pretty cool job to have found. I was working on the very first text messaging system (SMS) in the world — obviously at that time we had no idea how this would take off and literally change the way people around the world communicate.
In 91 I also joined a band, oddly named ‘Disband’, as a result of our Dundalk accents. We were never going to be hugely famous, but we became world famous in Dundalk, and I look back with pride with what we achieved. We played support to The 4 of Us, and The Stunning, big bands in Ireland at the time, were on TV a couple of times, wrote what I still think are some pretty cool songs, and I developed life long friendships with the band members.
By the end of the 90s the band had disbanded and I’d moved jobs, I was now working on a one-use credit card payment system, the first of it’s kind, something so common today we don’t even realise we’re using it. Again, it was a pretty unique job to have found. The Java programming language had just been invented and I’ve pretty much been using it ever since.
00s
The new century started but nothing changed really. Life went on the same in the 00s as they had in the 90s. By 2004 I had become disillusioned with my career, Dublin, and my life in general. I felt I needed to get away for a while, so I resigned and booked a 1 year trip around the world. My route would take me though South East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the U.S.A, before finally arriving back in Ireland. I never made it to the last 2 countries on that list.
On an overnight train from Bangkok to Vientiane a woman came over towards my seat and simply asked ‘Do you speak English?’, I had no idea at the time that that was the turning point in my life. We continued to travel together, through S.E. Asia & Australia, before finally arriving in NZ around March 2005. We fell in love with the country and the people very quickly. We decided to do what we could to stay here, and after securing working visas and jobs we settled in Auckland.
We married in 2007 and soon moved to Wellington, which has been our home since. Our first child was born in 2009 and the decade ended with my first family Christmas.
10s
Our first child was followed in quick succession by two more, one in 2011, and one at the end of 2012, so we had a very young family, and it was a lot of hard work I have to say. You can never underestimate how much effort is required to push a double buggy around the Wellington hills.
We made several trips back to Ireland & England during this time, the trips becoming easier as the children grew older.
I was still in the same job in Wellington that I had been since we moved in 2007 and was promoted to development manger around the middle of the decade. It meant less programming, but at the time it seemed to be the logical move for me. The company was taken over by a US company, so I ended up running the development team across Wellington, San Francisco & Chicago, with many a trip between them all.
20s
In the 20s I turned 50, and I’ll admit it was a difficult time for me. Realising that retirement was only 15 years away I re-assessed where I was and what I was doing. I didn’t want to spend the remainder of my career trying to climb further up the corporate ladders, it just wasn’t me. I loved programming and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. So, I gave up on my current path and became a self employed contractor, which allowed me to return to simply being a programmer. Will I do this until retirement? I hope so.
I also decided to grow a beard.
Realising that my life now spanned 6 decades, I started to write about my experiences, to remember those stories of what happened in my life to bring me to this point in time.
And that’s what brought me here.
What do you write?
Mostly memoirs, as over the years I’ve had encountered many people and situations which have been memorable. Some of these are good memories, some, well, not so good. However, all of them have brought me to where I am now.
I also dabble in the occasional fictional piece, and the odd technical article.
Thank you for reading my About Me story.
