When I was 14 or 15 I read a Sherlock Holmes story when, at the end, after revealing the plot elaborated by the villain, the célèbre detective says to Dr. Watson: L'homme, c'est rien; l'ouvrage, c'est tout, roughly translated as The man is nothing, the creation is everything. I am not sure what exactly Conan Doyle had in mind when he finished his Sherlock Holmes story with a french quotation, but, as this is not a Ph.D. on English literature or the like —you will forgive me any imprecisions, as I'm recalling from memory something I read more than 10 years ago—, let's take the phrase literally, i. e. an invention, a work of art means everything in and of itself, while the creator, the person who is behind it, represents nothing. Having said that, and surprisingly as it might seem, since the British detective was one of my heroes during my teenage years, I do not agree with the phrase at all. On the contrary, I think the creations, the achievements or, more simply, that which a person does, are deeply interwined with his or her own life story and the experiences lived. I hope that the next paragraphs, —somewere between mere autobiography and technical description— will shed some light on my personal path, a bit more and better explained than under the constraints of a normal CV, but with less eloquence than an average (literary) autobiography.
The beginnings
I've always been eager of knowledge, of knowing how things work —mostly related to science and technology—, why do they work as they do, what happens if we change the normal use, etc. When I was about seven or eight years old I loved science, I used to watch a TV program called Backyard Science or so, where the protagonists —young Australian adults— did scientific experiments geared towards children. I remember learning about liquid pressure as you press a closed soda bottle full of water, or basic chemical reactions. I really enyojed that TV show, though I didn't do all the experiments. It was at this time whn I bought some samples of mineral rocks sticked to the same strenghtened paper, where you could read the name of the mineral information and the like. I collected these samples —all on the same paper piece, which could be hung from the wall—. Even if I didn't became a mineralogist or a geographer, seeing the different textures of rocks and reading a bit about their properties was something I was fond of while other kids were playing football or at the cinema.
This rather simple experience —more symbolic than materially lasting— was probably indicative at the time that I had a special
interest —though a light one— in science and knowledge. Probably my first groundbreaking experience occured when I was about 10. I was
in fifth grade, and the science textbook had some experiments for us to replicate. Among them was ont that I still recall with joy:
a simple electrical circuit. At 26, and having studied mechatronics, the circuit could'nt be simpler: it is made up of only a battery,
two wires and a load, particularly a small, 2-5V light bulb, but when I was 10, and having nobody to guide me but my textbook and
curiosity, it felt as if I were doing something really cool. My mom took me to a small store in our neighborhood, and I bought —my mom,
actually— some simple, low-voltage electrical lightbulbs, a couple of sockets for them and some wire. I already had the batteries, so I
followed the instructions on the book, connected everything and voilà, it worked! The battery powered up the light bulb, and I
got to see a pretty, quarter-coin-size white light bulb, which illuminated the table where I was working. I kept experimenting with the
light bulbs, tried different connections to see how could I get the most light out of the battery —the connection types I tried then are
called series and parallel; ask ChatGPT or read Wikipedia to learn more about them— and prepared my circuit to show
it at the school the next days. Indeed, a lifelong lasting experience that took me on the path of all things electrical.
I still preserve the sockets I used back at the day, and some light bulbs —the others got burnt out, because screwing things up is part of learning—, and still work. That's how I started with my nerd/geek side at 8-10 years. Nothing stunning, but hey, 10 year old kids don't usually revolutionize science or technology.
My first computer: a window to the world
The next step in my now decade-long journey to become a software engineer was what a lot of people would consider essential: my first personal computer. I was 11 years old, in june-july 2011, as my parents took me to a TELMEX store and finally bought me my own, 100% mine laptop. It was a Toshiba Satellite or so —forgive that I can no longer recall the exact modell—, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, 5400 RPM, 15.6" screen with Windows 7 Starter. The first couple of years my computer was the place where I would do my homework, play Facebook and Flash games, ocasionally read Wikipedia —a habit that I still maintain to this day—, read about the games I played on my Xbox, and so on. Basically the average hobbies a 12-years old future geek like me did 15 years ago.
Later though, I started delving into more technical uses, ranging from trying to hack Facebook games with Cheat Engine to writing simple batch scripts to move files or create copies of them. Nothing quite remarkable, but the kid who writes 5-10 line scripts to run from the command line is without doubt the future software engineer working with frameworks, CI/CD, cloud computing and so on. To be honest, I must recognize that at that time I knew nothing about the Internet, I didn't knew about HTML and JavaScript, HTTP requests and responses, web servers, Apache, PHP, .NET ad so on. I was a simple and happy Facebook, YouTube, Google and Wikiepedia user —I watched mainly YouTube videos of Call of Duty, Halo and Minecraft, and I felt at home using it; later I learnt that the most popular video platform back at the day is and was also predominantly masculine in its users— although with a feeble but steadily increasing technical profile.
Mathematics and electronics: two recurring subjects when studying engineering
On august 2013, as I was in 2nd grade middle school, I had my first personal contact with high-school algebra. Our school required us to do exercises from the (in)famous Baldor's Algebra —a book which on older editions had a muslim-looking guy who almost everybody thought was the author, while in fact the book was written by Aurelio Baldor, a cuban-born mathematician—, and I not only did them, buy read entire chapters, ranging from linear and quadratic equations to systems of them, basic trigonometry, simple problems which could be reduced to systems of equations, fractions, and the like. There was something in the idea of working with unknown quantities, manipulating them symbolically and finally coming up with a solution that made everything come up together that I loved so much. Of course, high school algebra is not real analysis or topology; it is nonetheless something handy when it comes to introducing pre-teens to STEM disciplines. I still recall getting perfect or almost perfect grades on the simple, weekly exams we did in math class, and equaly good grades on the exams we did every two moths. This love of symbols continued through high-school and college, albeit when I —by my own means, as it is not common in engineering— started delving into logic and demonstrations, things got a bit more complex than I could manage. As everybody with a mild background in mathematics or physics knows, the mathematics done by —professional— mathematicians has little to do with engineering maths. Indeed, the former deals with a rather high degree of rigor, revolves around demonstrations of almost any mathematical proposition, builds systems from a set of axioms, and so on, while the latter has a computational approach, i. e. solving equations, finding —usually numeric— answer to problems and the like. To illustrate this fundamental difference, if in engineering math you are required to solve a defined integral, in a mathematics-oriented class you are expected to prove that the sum of an even and an odd number is odd. If in engineering maths you get a value, in a mathematician's class you build an argument. A fundamental difference, as is the difference between pure mathamtics and engineering...
If in engineering you are supposed to have at least a basic understanding of linear-algebra, calculus, probability and statistics, there is also another realm where you are supposed to be —at least— moderately proficient: electronics. Usually people start with basic integrated circuits like the now five-decades-old 555 timer, the classic 74xx TTL series and the 4xxx CMOS family. And that's how I started. From basic LED circuits I quickly moved on to the 555 timer and small projects involving the 74xx ICs, ranging from resistance-controlled oscillators to a fully-functional digital clock —which used old-school 7-segment red displays—, together with the basics of digital electronics —adders, ALUs, synchronous and asynchronous logic, counters, etc.—. Those circuits are not programmable like 8-bit PIC or AVR microcontrollers, but are quite handy to illustrate the building blocks of the digital electonics that drives our world today.
My time of experimenting with basic electronics was somewhere between 2015 and 2017, some two and a half years, and that's when I discovered Arduino; althuogh I didn't use it at the time, it drew my attention deeper into software. As anybody who has programmed Arduino projects knows, it uses a subset of C++ where you can work with macro definitions, arrays, bitwise operations and the like.
Finally, programming!
The basic concepts of programming that I previously looked upon turned out to be very useful when I took my first formal programming class at college, in the winter semester of 2018, when I was 18-19 years old. Still almost 8 years later I have the —rather small— projects that I built back then, ranging from basic console programs to understand particular topics like functions, classes, modules and templates to another console-based interactive periodic table. Looking it from today, it seems indeed quite simple: just a terminal program that prompted the user to select a particular chemical element from a hardcoded list —it had the about 120 elements— and gave him or her information about the element, like atomic nuber, symbol, description of it and so on. No Internet connection, no APIs, no databases, no frameworks, no fancy-looking user menu, no authentication, no worries about security, scalability or —posisble— technical debt... That was my first programming project, and I see it with some nostalgy from today, given all what I have learnt since then.
In the next two semesters I got more actively involved with software development, ranging from OOP —which felt quite strange for someone coming directly from procedural programming— to data structures and algorithms, though at an introductory level. I was fond of learning about sorting and searching algorithms, insertion sort, merge sort, quicksort, heapsort —my all-time favorite—, data scturcutres like arrays, linked lists, (binary) search trees, graphs, heaps, stacks, notions like the Big O notation and the idea behind it. Formally speaking, heaps and stacks are not data structures as such, but rather interfaces, i. e., they are defined in terms of the set of operations they support, like insertion, deletion, retrieval of the last element —or first—, and so on. But in a mechatronics-oriented programming class, you don't delve that deeply in the theory of computing —let alone formal languages and automata—, you basically just care of getting the code do wathever you want. I must admit, though, that the lack of software background —thinking about complexity, performance, scalability, security and so on— hits you later when you do some sort of switch from mechatronics to full-time professional software development, as you make mistakes that another entry-level developer coming from a software or CS background probably wouldn't make, but hey, the internet is full of docs, tutorials and StackOverflow. Thou shalt not waste the free resources offered to thee.
The second half of engineering was not that much geared towards software, as we had classes like PLC programming, analog and digital control, and more hardware-oriented courses. It was at this time, around 2022, that I started delving in the classic 8-bit AVR microcontrollers, programming them in assembly and later C++. Oh yes! I got to learn the basic instructions like MOV, ADD, JMP and so on, and even if it has little practical value when doing web development it is quite rewarding to see how code works at an —almost— machine-level. You see how at each clock cycle the microcontroller's state changes in just a tiny little part, be it at the registers, at some memory address, or the next instruction's pointer. These low-level concepts tend to be overlooked when working with Arduino, as it is mostly used to do some quick prototyping rather than developing performance-critical, long-ranging applications at an industry level.
My internship at Continental: coding in a professional environment
One of the most interesting experiences —though not exempt of certain disillusionments— in my journey with STEM-related fields took place between october 2022 and may 2023, as I was an intern at the world-class automotive company Continental, where I was in a team that developped apps used by the testing department.
In my 7-month internship I collaborated in the development of an app that used the CAN protocol to communicate with external hardware, replicate log messages generated by some handy tools, send commands —not only through CAN but also I2C, serial, and other protocols— to devices and thus verify their responses. The app was written in .NET Framework, —version 4.7.2 if I recall correctly—, a rather old-school Win Forms-based Windows application with C# as its main language. Here I not only strenghtened my OOP principles, but got into event-driven programming, as the controls from the interface trigger events. Though old-style-looking both in the user interface and the framework, I learnt quite a bit, as in global-class tech companies there is always a project to work on, something to do, and ultimately what you need the most is time.
College is now over: what's next?
The leitfaden of what I have written up to this point is my love and approach to STEM, from basic physics exercises up to branch merging at Github on the last weeks of my internship. One thing —perhaps the most important— is missing: real, actual work experience. And I am not void of it: as I'm writing these lines, I have been working at a small, local company in Guadalajara called IdeaSys, where as a junior developer I develop basic features to our appsm write docs and execute tests. Nonetheless, I think that I should close my attempt of a technical autobiography precisely at this moment, the point that makes a before and after that is represented by the first real job straight out of college. This has been my technical journey uo to April 2026, with ups and downs, periods of progress and (auto)perceived stagnation, both by personal and general reasons. If you read all the way through to the end, well, congrats and thanks! You have a genuine curiosity about my curriculum vitae —a beautiful latin expression meaning literally life's journey— and also an attention span and commitment to read other people's thoughts that is becoming rare in the digital landscape these days.
Postscript
The above technical autobiography touched upon mostly technical stuff, from the programming languages I have used to the subjects I studied by myself as a teenager. Basically I don't narrate anything personal. Well, this is the time: I am 26 years old at the time of writing this, and while it is true that I love technology and software, I don't let it possess me. On my spare time I like to go on riding MiBici bikes —the public bycicle system in Guadalajara— or just walk along the streets of my city, from zones like my child neighborhood Residencial Victoria to Ladrón de Guevera, Santa Tere, Mezquitán, Arcos Vallarta, Colonia Americana and more. Streets like Justo Sierra, Av. Hidalgo, Manuel Acuña and Av. La Paz are perfect to mentally recreate the places visited, the people met and the years when one was there but are already gone. Writing these type of personal texts while drinking a coffee at the José Luis Martínez Bookstore of Chapultepec or observing people walk by —especially foreigners, mostly Americans and one or two Europeans— and opening the mind for reflexion and ideas are quite rewarding experiences.
The days when I'm having a good time at the placees above mentiones are actually just a few each month. What I often do, several times per week and on weekends, is reading. Reading became one of my favorite activities starting college, and I enjoy reading about quite distinct topics, ranging from Mexican history to German philosophers and contemporary intellectuals. From the articles by Enrique Krauze at Letras Libres and Jorge Castañeda at Nexos to Golo Mann and his compelling narration of German history, Günther Anders and his thesis of the obsolescence of human beings and mass media in his small, aphoristic Ketzereien to Jacques Julliard and his history of the French left since 1762 and Pierre-André Taguieff writing about the idea of progress, one of the great myths of western Modernity. Yes, writing code by day and reading unknown intellectuals and writers at night and on weekends is not a very common lifestyle for a software developer, but hey, nothing is written in stone...