About Juan

I grew up in the 80s and 90s in Spain, mostly playing video games, D&D and tinkering with a primitive Apple MacIntosh. When Unreal Tournament 99 came out, I learned how to build websites using PHP and since then I have been programming.

I dropped out of high school in my last year out of desire to build things and impatience with formal education. I then worked for a few years as a programmer in various startups and as an amateur white-hat hacker in a consulting company. I enjoyed it and I also learned enough to see how wide my skills gap was so I went back to studying.

Thanks to my mom who always encouraged my sibling and I to travel, I spent one year in university studying in Japan (Tohoku University), and another in the US (UIUC). I also spent a summer internship at CERN. Those three experiences left dramatically impacted my life and I cherish the memories I have of them. After finishing university, I joined Google and I spent the next ten years solving problems involving machine learning, spam and abuse fighting, big data pipelines, and monitoring and visualization.

After that experience, I took a break from big tech and I moved to a remote place in the mountains. I then gathered more important life experiences, I worked with a few startups in finance and customer support, I spent some time dabbling in options trading, I joined an ex-colleague from Google on a tech coaching and mentoring role, and I’m nowadays working again with a fast growing startup where I’m having a blast.

Other long-term interests besides building software: yoga, vipassana, resistance training and running, D&D, reading, and hiking.

About this site

This site contains entries dating back to the early 2000s, when I started blogging. Since then, I’ve written about travel, hiking, living around the world, books, movies & TV series, anime, video games, D&D adventure logs, doodles, self-experiments, yoga, learning, and expertise.

I write to think better and help others by sharing tools and experiences. If what I write has particularly helped you or you see factual errors, please let me know in the comments.