I was once asked by a coworker, "What made you work with computers?" And the answer is very clear: an Elven archer moving through the snow in Warcraft II. Seeing all the fun a computer could provide, and the capabilities a piece of burnt sand could have, I thought to myself, "This is amazing! I have to learn more about this!!"

I studied computer science in Spain, my birthplace, where I was immensely lucky to be surrounded by professors and classmates I could learn a lot from.

From my Programming professor, who was truly into design patterns, to the Networking professor I got into a very public argument with over IP address classes A, B, and C (and who later ended up directing my thesis), to the Digital Electronics professor I once explained why planes can fly, demonstrating the Bernoulli principle by blowing over a piece of paper after one too many beers.

Same with my classmates. For instance, my first encounter with Linux happened because of one of them. He had a (back then bulky) laptop with a really sleek desktop. I asked, "Hey! What's that?" He said, "Linux, yo! Linux!! 'Tis awesome, 'tis great, 'tis amazing!!'"

He explained that I had to go to debian.org, download some CD .iso files, and install it. So I did. I went through the installation process, formatted the drive, created a username and password, and then my computer asked, "Reboot now?" I rebooted. Then, a black screen with a blinking cursor appeared. I thought, "What the heck?? Where are the fancy icons? Where's the cool background?"

I remembered the username and password from the installation process, entered them, and saw "Welcome to your Debian 3.0.". Just that. No fancy icons. No cool background. The next day, I went back to my classmate, complaining. He explained how X-Windows worked, how it was a separate set of utilities in a Linux distribution, and how you could have different ones.

I asked, "Ok... so which one is yours?" He replied, "Fluxbox, yo! Fluxbox!! 'Tis awesome, 'tis great, 'tis amazing!!'"

I proceeded to run apt-get install fluxbox. A lot was downloaded (over a single-channel ISDN connection, 64 kbps). I typed startx. Now a gray screen with an "X" popped up. Again, I thought, "What the heck??" I started hitting random keys, moving my mouse... until I clicked the right mouse button. A menu appeared. That was when I got it. I had just installed the basic scaffolding to run window-based apps.

It was a long process to get my desktop exactly how I wanted it, and I loved it. That's still me. My fondest memories involve strolling through the office asking, "Heeeeey... What cool feature did you find in SQLAlchemy?" or explaining why an os.fork() would cause those pesky"Database connection closed" errors.

I enjoy software. I enjoy everything a computer can do, and I love learning new things and sharing what I know with people who are interested in learning more. And probably with a few people who weren't interested but were too polite to tell me to shut up.

I arrived in the U.S. for what was supposed to be a five-month paid internship. That was 16 years ago. During one of my first interviews, a company told me, "All our backend is programmed in Python". I admitted, "I learned with Java. I don't know Python". "You're hired!!", they replied. So I started learning Python, and I liked it a lot.

Since then, I've been fortunate to work in fast-paced startups where any day could be different, allowing me to learn a lot and wear multiple hats. From working on web applications (where I spent most of my time), to figuring out AWS security groups and how to open a port because the platform team was too busy, to assembling tables. No, not SQL tables: Ikea furniture, because our new desks had just been delivered.

I also learned how different a problem can be when you're dealing with a file that has 10 rows versus 10 million. I learned how changing your site's language can completely break those pixel-perfect alignments you had. I learned what a trigraph is, how complex geospatial "stuff" can get, that there are two days every year that aren't 24 hours long andt that "today" in the US can already be "tomorrow" in UTC.

And thankfully, I'm still not done learning.