About me.
What's up, I'm Jose Ricardo Herrera, and online I go by Hejoric. I'm a fourth-year Computer Science student at the University of Virginia, class of 2027.
What I like building is usable niche tools: software for someone with a specific problem who isn't going to write the code themselves. A retail store still running a 15 year old system. A nonprofit paying $178 a year for hosting it didn't need. Work like that means I spend as much time on deploys, data migrations, and DNS as I do on features, and I'd take that over the other way around. I started out doing freelance work for my family's businesses, and I wanted to point the same skills at something bigger than profit, which is how I ended up running the web and infrastructure for a nonprofit.
Outside of code: guitar and piano (working on Snow by RHCP, with the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata as the long game), Korean 101 at UVA with a JLPT N3 retake somewhere down the road, the gym, salsa and bachata, and gaming. I also run a YouTube channel that's basically a video journal of my life: playing, gameplay, travel. The goal is weekly, and showing people what being a UVA student is actually like.
I put all of it on this site on purpose. I'd rather be public about what I'm working on and how far along I actually am, and if that gets one person to start tracking their own thing and go after it, that's a win. Reach out any time, I like the questions.
- Rebuilt a managed WordPress site as a statically generated Astro and Tailwind site on Cloudflare Pages, cutting recurring hosting cost from $178/year to roughly $12/year for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
- Migrated hosting, DNS, and domain registration from Bluehost to Cloudflare with zero downtime, consolidating registrar, DNS, and CDN under one provider.
- Integrated Keystatic, a Git-based CMS storing content as YAML, so staff edit pages in the browser without going near a repo while every change stays version-controlled. Wrote the stack documentation for volunteer handoff.
- Run the organization's Google Workspace, Google Ads, SEO, search, and analytics alongside the site and DNS.
- Operated AS/400 mainframe workflows for inventory tracking and sales analysis in a legacy enterprise environment.