Although I don’t consider myself “young” (I recently turned 38), my whole life has been strongly attached to IT, usually in its most practical form – and sometimes also in its most playful forms -. I met the utilitarian side of computing at a very early stage of my life; at the age of eight I came across what would be the first personal computer I met in my life, an Apple II that was bought by an uncle to be used in his company, something that was highly prized “because it would allow the secretary to work better”; the truth is that my cousins and I used it to waste paper on the printer and play Hangman, but I don’t remember ever having a problem with her because she “preferred to use her reliable typewriter and keep her huge accounting books by hand“. Honestly I didn’t care about that, what dazzled me was that white mechanical beauty, that was pure magic.

My fascination with computers at that time led me to sign up for a programming course in Basic (young people can lookout for it and learn about that Pokemon here) because I wanted to know what other interesting things could be done with that marvel, obviously I fell in love with the turtle when I met her. The next thing that came was the demand for “a tower” (for the layman, the term tower is a colloquialism that refers to a desktop PC with a tower). I remember that moment when a brand new x386 arrived at my house, I felt an epiphany, one that led me down the path of sleep deprivation and my mother’s scolding me for not wanting to go to bed on time.

I still remember the heartbreak of the first breakdown of my wonderful and powerful machine, a feeling that did not last long because thanks to that I was able to see how to repair a PC, and the world of “clones” opened up to me in all its splendor. I acquired the basics of English as a secondary language because of the need to understand what I was doing, to be able to read the manuals and even to be able to play the games. Nostalgia makes me miss those beautiful times playing “Heroes Quest” and “F117”; and it makes me note that I believe that I have never thanked my mother for sponsoring so much in my youth, buying parts, burning parts, replacing parts, running out of computers, ruining the work of days and more.

Later on I arrived at the university where I would acquire my Business degree, without leaving my taste for “tinkering with computers”, which basically made me the only one with an acceptable level of technical knowledge in computers, and made them add a lot of additional work to my already overburdened academic curriculum; I helped in the technical room of the auditorium, and sometimes they let me handle it completely to meet additional requirements in other areas of the university. They even left me the keys of the computer room to administer the resource in the free spaces of academic time, I remember that I became very popular thanks to another great joy of youth, the “Lan Parties”; no one else knew how to make those things work. Later on would come what would be my first project in the technological area: a director of one of the programs of my faculty asked me to check what could be done to fix a lot of discarded equipment. With some basic work, a little ingenuity and some technological cannibalism I managed to recover ¾ parts of the equipment, and as I had an acceptable level of success (Yeah, I know, at that time the “adults” were easily dazzled with these issues) they gave me their approval for a budget to buy some additional parts to recover the equipments for greater demand tasks and fix what could still be recovered.

Thanks to this taste for information technology, throughout my professional career I always ended up involved in technological projects, designing LANs, structuring wireless links, IT infrastructure projects, software development and even once developing hardware for electromedicine. This path has taken me to where I am today, at the forefront of the initiatives of SWAPPS, a company that I have seen grow over time and with which I have been involved in interesting projects for a long time, and which now trusted me to take them “to infinity and beyond”.

Yes, is a beautiful challenge, a challenge I accepted because I know that what lies ahead will be worth it.