About

Bio

Ara has been working on the Web since 1997. He’s been a freelancer, the webmaster at Festival Just For Laughs, a front-end web developer and practice lead at Nurun, a Front-End Engineer on the Mail team at Yahoo! and most recently, a Front-End Engineer on the Cloud Services team at HP. Ara’s experience comes from having worked on every aspect of web development throughout his career, but he’s now following his passion for web standards-based front-end development. When he isn’t speaking and writing about best practices or coding professionally, he’s maintaining his personal site at http://arapehlivanian.com/.

Pronouncing my name

If you want to know how to pronounce my last name, just say “peel of onion” and then change the “peel” to “pel.” Pel iv anian (the ‘h’ is silent).

A brief history

The first computer I ever touched was an Apple ][ in a 1989 high school typing class. The following year I learned how to program in LOGO on the very same machines. Then it was on to the Comterms (what you could call a PC) and GWBASIC. Somewhere in the blur of my early high school years, I got my first computer, an XT clone with 768kB of RAM and a 10MB SCSI hard drive to which I added the AdLib Music Synthesizer card.

In 1993 I discovered the demoscene when I saw Future Crew‘s Unreal. I was in awe and dove right in, joining the local demoscene BBS of the day, the Spasm-O-Tron. Not long after that, I started my own, TimeRift. I also co-founded a demo group called Night Vision, later to become SATiRe, as well as joining KFMF for a while. Throughout my involvement I went by the alias Epeius until the latter years when I switched over simply to Ara.

Through contacts in the scene I landed my first computer related job at a wholesaler. Rebuilding their website in 1997 was the first real site I ever built (apart from a personal one I had at the time). That lead to a small intranet job for Nortel, and a few contracts and jobs later I ended up webmaster at the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival for four years. After that I went to work for Nurun as a Front-end Architect working on projects for highly visible clients. Today I’m a Front End Engineer for Yahoo! on the Yahoo! Mail team.

Read more about my inglorious life here.

*I do not speak for nor represent anyone but myself. The content published on this site is entirely me.

Faith

The Nicene Creed pretty much sums up what I believe.

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