I'm Rafael.
Husband, dad of two wonderful kids, designer, developer, freelancer.

I've been playing Counter-Strike since the first beta, that was 1999. Back then still a Half-Life mod, downloaded over a 56k modem that blocked the phone line for hours while my mother tried to make a call.

Two years later came Dust 2, in March 2001 with Counter-Strike 1.1, and the map left everything else in the dust. For anyone who doesn't know it, it's just a map in a shooter. For me it was the place where a big part of my youth happened.

Gaming was my thing, and not because school was nothing, but because in front of the screen I saw real progress. Clear goal, clear outcome, getting better was possible. That wasn't always the case at school.

I played in clans, from ESL to Faceit, and it was all of it: LANs, scrims, online tournaments. My gamertag was raf first, then rafo, then raaaf, because someone always had the name already. raaaf stuck, still does.

Training, matches, demo reviews. Which nade where, who pushes mid when, what a step on wood versus stone sounds like. At some point it wasn't about reacting anymore, it was about the system underneath.

In a clan you need two things: a website and a forum signature. Animated if possible, with glow effects and a clever tagline.

I started making sigs. First for myself, then for others in the clan, eventually for people from other clans too.

At some point sigs were too small, and I wanted to design whole pages. Clan pages with header, menu and news section, Photoshop layouts in a style that looks retro today and was modern back then.

I worked with Photoshop and Adobe Flash for the animated stuff, and YouTube tutorials didn't exist yet. Instead forums, tutorial blogs and lots of trial and error, rebuilding pixels until you understood how someone else did it. That was the school.

Dreamweaver, table layout, spacer GIFs. Cringe today, pure magic back then.

The site wasn't anything special, but it was mine. And it was proof that I could build the whole thing end to end.

Smaller clan pages came in parallel, then logos, then the yearbook for my graduation class, which I designed from cover to cover and got print-ready. No job, no money, just because I could and wanted to.

The first paid jobs came soon after, with small hourly rates and nothing to put on a resume. But that wasn't the point. The point was that someone was willing to pay for what I'd have done at night anyway.

Graduated, then studies, first in Ravensburg with Quelle, then Hamburg at HSBA with Otto.

In Hamburg, through a friend, I saw agencies from the inside for the first time, helped out, watched and understood how pros work. Hamburg was school, Nuremberg became serious.

Back in Nuremberg I went into an agency, and my job was to build up the digital unit with a colleague. No template, no blueprint, just the mandate that it was our thing now. I learned a lot in that time, including things you don't learn in courses.

In parallel there was another program at BAW, and that's where I met Alex. She became my wife. Best souvenir I've ever brought home from a training.

Later I moved to the agency where she worked, machen.de, and that was the best team I'd had up to that point. Until we wanted to grow and our boss didn't. Then came the jump.

The trigger was a phone call. A contact at adidas needed help on a project and asked if I'd consider going freelance for it.

My thought was, with adidas in my back pocket I've got a safe client, so I can go a hundred percent and try it. And that's what I did.

A short while later the project got cancelled. adidas gone, plan gone. But I had the guts to keep going anyway, and worked my way up bit by bit.

A few years freelancing, then to adorsys to build a design team. That was at least the plan.

Instead I slid into DATEV's first B2C large-scale project for a few years. No design team, one big client. You don't always end up where the contract promised, and sometimes that's bad, here it was okay.

Then came my wife's startup, Matchmanao. Building for your own family is different from building for clients, because it's more personal, thinner-skinned, with less clocking out. But what stays is something you can't write into a PDF.

Then back to adorsys, because it had been good before and the team was right. Design again, among other things the adorsys website rebuilt from scratch. A few years, solid work, nothing spectacular.

The moment it turned was unspectacular: early last year, three in the morning at the airport. My sister, brother-in-law and their son were flying out, and I drove them.

Back home I tried to sleep again, but couldn't. It was quiet though, nobody wanted anything from me, and somewhere in that hour of just lying there and letting my thoughts go, it hit me: I function in employment, but I won't be happy that way, because I'm not a hundred percent free.

That was it. No argument, no resignation with a bang, just one quiet hour and an honest answer to a question I'd never asked myself that directly.

Now back to where it all started: freelancing. Only this time with fifteen more years of experience, a network that holds, and the clarity that this is the right thing.

The tools have changed: Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, Sketch, WordPress, Figma, React, terminal, today AI. The pattern underneath is the same.

Listen, understand what someone actually needs, and then build.

Right now I'm building two apps of my own.

events.rafaelalex.de puts an end to the WhatsApp chaos around every party: RSVPs, bring-along lists, carpooling, photos, all in one place, with no account needed for guests. For birthdays, clubs, team events and weddings, born out of the frustration anyone knows who's ever coordinated fifty people.

zeit.rafaelalex.de is time tracking and invoicing for freelancers, made for everyone who feels, every time they write an invoice, like they've forgotten hours. Multiple clients, hourly rates, fixed prices, retainers, all in one place instead of five spreadsheets. Kanban for projects, expenses tracked alongside, exports for the accountant, and hosted in Germany.

Both are coming along, both with AI in the cockpit, and I'm learning an incredible amount doing it. Mostly how fast you can build today once you know what you want. Ideas that pop into your head in the morning, running in the browser by the evening. I used to need weeks for that, now a good day is enough.

Just like back in the clan, only the map has a different name now.