I started out as a trainee at an industrial company, working on integration problems between legacy systems, data integrity across long and messy processes, 24/7 availability, and a caffeine habit I will tell you about some other time. To actually solve a problem, you have to understand it. That is the most valuable thing I learned back when I was starting out, and it has paid off ever since. It got me through my first real exercises in technical translation: what a plant worker needed, what an HR assistant needed, what management needed. I ended up talking to all of them. And because of that I could design and deliver a system that genuinely moved their productivity, their time and, above all, their results. Curiosity I cannot switch off, plus wanting to do things properly, took me from trainee to owning architectures that millions of people now depend on. Because writing code is one thing. Understanding the business you are in, and turning its problems into real solutions under the criteria that actually apply there, is another.
Judgment is forged by making decisions that carry real consequences. It takes nerve to step out front and be wrong, and a lot more to go back and fix it. Judgment teaches you to ask up front the questions that bite you later. A job title does not.
I was a teaching assistant in several subjects on the Ingeniería Informática course at Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René Moreno (UAGRM), which I started in 2017 and have paused for now, though I plan to go back to it. Teaching is where I would like to take this eventually.
Outside of work, the same instinct shows up in sport: climbing and hiking around Bolivia (Huayna Potosí included), and amateur boxing.
I just like being bad at something new until I’m not.
For a second data point on the same thing: I came out INTJ-A, “Architect”, on 16Personalities. Independent, rational, and more at ease designing a system than running the room it lives in, which lines up with how most of the decisions above actually got made. Full profile →
