About me
My real name is Álvaro, but I go on the internet as Raktapadma. I am a guy (male) from Argentina, born in March 1996. My main interests are computing, music (and its production) and photography.
I make things mostly by curiosity, a need to make things that are helpful and beneficial to myself (and other people too), even if they can be insignificant or just silly, learning how and why things work and even out of boredom.
I produced some electronic music (mostly psytrance) as Cynos, since late 2011, but I decided to take a break from it in 2020, since I got devoted to some personal programming projects.
Regarding programming, I got partially interested in it in 2008 or 2009 when
I was messing around with Winamp's AVS music visualizer and, around 2012 or
2013, with MilkDrop, because I liked this idea of pretty visuals reacting to the
music. I learned to make my own presets by figuring out how other presets were
done. Also, I got some interest in HTML's <canvas> element
and what can be done with it, so I started learning a bit of JavaScript to do
things with it. Between 2013 and 2015, I was experimenting with Processing. In
some of my university assignments, I learned C in 2014, C++ in 2015 (partially,
but I learned the rest by myself later) and a bit of Python in 2019.
I also got interested in photography somewhere between 2010 and 2011, so I started taking lessons in 2011, until 2016. I participated in a couple photography-related events and I even got hired as a photographer some few times.
Identity
Since 2009, I went under the alias Cynos (the Greek word for "dog" or some corruption of it) and so, in 2011, I started producing music as such. I chose that alias because of a previous nickname that was rather cringy.
Between 2018 and 2019, I was reading a page about symbology, where I found out about the lotus flower and what does it represent. Then, I got interested in its symbolism, so I started to go as Raktapadma (Sanskrit for "red lotus flower"). I made this choice because it works as a sort of reminder of what I should be, as well as how nice it sounds.
About this site
I started making this site because I needed to organize and show the stuff I make properly. Several years ago, I tried to open a blog, but it turned out to not be good for what I wanted.
Currently, it is coded "by hand", but I'm planning to make a static site generator in the future, when this site starts taking shape.
This site was first created in April 14, 2024.