About Juan
I was born in the 1980s in Spain. As a teenager, I played D&D and video games, I got into programming through various directions: videogame mods, web programming, computer viruses. I later channeled that desire to create into building a Spanish gaming community that over the years gathered over 70,000 registered users and had everything but the kitchen sink.
After high school, I chose not to go to college because I knew how to program in Python and use Linux and that’s you needed to succeed. Instead, I spent the next few years working in IT and founding or co-founding a few startups. The experience made me understand how little I knew and, luckily, I was able to go into university and study computer science. I spent a summer studying and working at CERN, a year in Japan and another year in the US. All three experiences, but particularly the year in Japan, was magical and will stay with me forever. 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, I took a break, moved to a remote area, and recently started working with startups in finance and customer support.
In parallel to all of this I’ve been practicing yoga and Vipassana meditation for a long time. I believe there’s a 50% chance that our consciousness and true self is exclusively supported by matter, but I also believe there’s a 50% chance that the soul is eternal and independent and we are somehow it’s entangled with the mind. So I’m half-stoic, half-yogi.
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. As of August 2022, I’m in the process of cleaning up the site, removing useless entries, and improving the existing content before writing new one.
I write to understand things better, and I write mainly for myself in a public way, an approach called digital garden nowadays. I hope that people reaching this site finds value in what I write, of course, but right now that’s not my priority. I also revise my writing constantly as I revise my thinking, which may leave pages in an inconsistent state despite my efforts to maintain readability throughout revisions.
What you see on these pages is my best understanding of what I write about. If you think I’m wrong (factual errors, invalid or incomplete conclusions, etc.), please let me know; you will be helping me.
Here are screenshots of how the blog looked like in the past.
Spanish pages
I started blogging in 2001 in Spanish and only switched to English in 2010. Most of what I wrote back then had little value and I’ve deleted it, but I couldn’t get myself to delete what’s left. I apologize for those of you who don’t currently read Spanish.
Site technology
The first versions of the blog were entirely static HTML files made in Macromedia Dreamweaver. Later I found out 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 being hacked and moved to Hugo, a static site generator, and Vim. Nowadays I start writing drafts in Obsidian, usually after sketchnoting on a Moleskine or iPad. The drafts get exported to Hugo through a chain of Git post-commit hooks that ultimately triggers a Netlify deployment.