02 Oct 2026
Hi, I'm Jason Benfrin.
It's an alias since I don't feel comfortable openly sharing my legal name wide open on the internet. However, if you dig far enough you'll probably find my legal name but I'd like to be called as Jason. It's a name I came up in my 6th grade if I remember correctly. Before that my name in my English school was Ben since I loved Ben 10, the alien cartoon series, as a kid. And I wanted to keep that name "Ben" so I came up with Jason Benfrin. It's quite a unique name I'd say. If you search up "Jason Benfrin", you'd only see stuff related to me.
Now, some information about me. I was born in Myanmar, a South-East Asia country whose neighbouring countries are China, India, Thailand, Bangladesh and Laos. My home country is quite a diverse country with 8 national races made up of 135 ethnic groups. I moved to Finland in December 2022 to study in highschool and now I'm studying in University of Oulu.
I pursued this programming career back in 2020 when COVID pandemic just started. I remember that I'd been taking online classes so I was given full access to our family laptop that I only get to use in the summer to play some videogames. And one day, out of boredom, I decided to get started on learning programming. I thought to myself, "Well, I'm going to need programming one day and I'd be a useful skill if I want to later become a physicist."
Never had I thought I'd fall in love with programming more than physics. My first programming language was Java. The reason was that since I played a lot of Minecraft a lot, I've heard a lot about Java. Minecraft is written in Java and It made sense to me that I would learn to make Minecraft mods. But to this day I've never made a single Minecraft mod. After learning a few basics in Java, I then headed to writing code in Javascript. That's because I wanted to make a Discord bot for music for my friends when Groovy, one of the best music bots on Discord, was shut down. And I found myself writing Discord bots using Node.js and hosting them on Replit for quite a while. In between then and moving to Finland, I learned some other programming languages like C++, Python but I didn't find a lot of projects to use those.
Then I moved to Finland, for a while I wasn't improving my skills. Maybe it had to do with trying to adjust myself to the new place far from my family. But in the summer of 2023 I started to work on a website for my girlfriend. She wanted to do a blog like website and I took the opportunity to make one. At first I didn't use any frameworks at all and just used plain html, css and js and served it on Cloudflare pages. It took me around a year to finish which was not only not optimal, she also lost interest in it. And so currently, it just sits there with no blogs.
Then my second work was referred to me by a friend. It was a company in Singapore and I used React for the first time. Let's just say that didn't go as planned. I was busy with high school and took longer than what I estimated. Then my latest work would be making a restaurant website for my friend. That was probably the very first time I finished a website in a reasonable time. I did everything from design, implementation, discussing requirements with the client in the span of around 4 months if I remember correctly. The techs I used were Figma for design, Vercel to host the website, Next.js and MongoDB.
I've always wanted to make a personal portfolio of some sort but never got to do it. And now that my English course needs me to write weekly blogs, I knew it's about time to make a blog website. I've been sitting on this jasonbenfrin.dev domain for almost 2 years. I've used only used it for mail and gaming servers. So mostly just for adding DNS records to reroute addresses.
I had a week to put at least a blog system so I didn't have much time to make a fully fleshed out portfolio, yet... I'll be updating this site very frequently if I'm not busy.
Blogging is going to be fun because I get to share my experience and meet those who have the same interests as me. I hope I'll be able to get good criticism from you readers, especially you, yes you! Leave a comment down below, write something, about anything, you may need a Github account. Thank you for reading and please do check my blogs weekly. In the future, I'll put RSS feed and email subscription if you want to get notified!