About Juan

I was born in the 1980s in Spain. As a kid and a teenager, I played D&D and video games. At one point I learned how to program because I wanted to create an online community for a game series I loved and I needed to make it update automatically. That small community eventually evolved into a larger community that, over the years, gathered 70,000 users and had everything but the kitchen sink.

I dropped out of high school in my last year because I didn’t find what I was being taught interesting, and I preferred to build things with software. I spent a few years started working in IT and co-founding two startups. I enjoyed the experience and saw the possibilities but also my skills gap so I went back to studying, this time with a purpose.

I spent one of my university years studying in Japan, and another in the US, and I also spent a summer internship at CERN. All three experiences left a deep mark in me and expanded my horizons. After finishing college, I joined Google thanks to a senior university classmate who had heard of me, and I spent the following decade solving problems involving machine learning, spam and abuse fighting, and data monitoring and visualization.

After that experience, I took a break from big tech work, and I moved to a remote country. I spent some time off, tinkering with various projects and eventually started collaborating with a financial startup interested in using LLMs to empower their users. After that experience I started collaborating with a customer support startup also interested in using LLMs, and, at the same time, started providing consulting services to startups via Product Matters.

Nowadays I continue providing consulting services while I focus on building a new set of skills.

In parallel to writing code, I’ve been practicing yoga and Vipassana meditation to try to master and steer my mind and find serenity.

About this site

This site contains entries dating back to the early 2000s, when I started blogging. In these two decades, I’ve written about a wide variety of topics: 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 to remember, and I write about things that I care about. If you see factual errors or you have any other type of feedback, feel free to let me know.

Here are screenshots of how the blog looked like in the past.

Site technology

The first versions of the blog were entirely static HTML files made in Macromedia Dreamweaver. Later, I learned how to create dynamic pages, converted the blog to PHP, and started using Vim. After that, I discovered Wordpress.org and used it self-hosted for many years. Eventually, I got tired of the site regularly getting hacked and moved to Hugo, a static site generator. Nowadays I do most of my writing in Obsidian. The drafts get exported to Hugo through a chain of Git post-commit hooks that ultimately triggers a Netlify deployment.