My dad sat me in front of a computer when I was five years old. All I remember is that he made me move the mouse to see if I could do anything with the screen reader of the time, some old version of JAWS. I certainly didn't get anywhere, but his vision was clear. A computer with a screen reader would open many doors for me, it would be something like my translator for talking to the world in work, studies, and entertainment. And boy, was it true.
Some time later I got a laptop. My parents put Braille letters on the keyboard so I could learn to type. My dad taught me how to open games with keyboard shortcuts and I learned the menus by heart. Later he taught me how to type in Microsoft Word, and then my curiosity grew exponentially. I wanted him to teach me how to copy music to my MP3 player. He taught me how to use Skype to talk to my friends and how to get around the basics of Windows. And really, the basics were enough for me to keep exploring things. We had backups of the entire disk partition created with Norton Ghost in case I broke something, so I had total freedom to break things and learn. How could I forget Windows Live Messenger and Messenger Plus. I could even shut down the computer of those who had it installed just by sending them a command!
The next thing that kept me awake at night was learning how to browse the web, to be useful by searching things in Google, to be able to download some software and install it. I didn't rest until I did it and I remember that moment perfectly. But that wasn't enough either. Then I became obsessed with creating a website! Every time I turned on the computer, my first action was to Google, “how to create a website”, even when we went to play in the computer lab at school. Every time I got different results. I tried many services, many ways to do it, read many sites. In many cases I didn't understand anything but I was putting all the concepts together although I still don't know how, sometimes things just happen.
Then I came to the conclusion that a web page was a simple .html file and I could create it with Macromedia Dreamweaver. Without fear of breaking things, I discovered that an HTML was not like writing a Microsoft Word document, but that as I formatted the text, Dreamweaver converted it to the HTML code that corresponded. So I just had to play around a bit to figure out what each tag meant. It was awesome to make different kinds of headings, lists, links, inputs, buttons and hear my screen reader recognize them. I already had a local web page! Now I needed to know how to publish it on the internet.
Knowing that HTML was the basis of everything, it didn't take me long to discover the concept of web hosting. I found one that was great at the time and free, Nixiweb. I opened an account and created a hosting for a .net domain. They sent me the FTP connection details, I uploaded my HTML using FileZilla, logged into the domain and, it didn't work. Another problem.
Until I discovered domain names. I understood that you had to pay for that, but then I found another domain, .tk, from a small island in Oceania called Tokelau. They were offering free domains to become known, great strategy. I got my domain name, but I didn't understand how to connect it to my Nixiweb hosting. So in desperation and trying anything, I made it so that when I entered the domain it showed the HTML hosted in 🥁... Dropbox! Pretty crappy. But it felt like a real accomplishment for me. Barely 11 years old and I already had my website. I was already convinced that this was my passion, web development. A few weeks later I discovered DNS and was able to do it right.
At that time I had an internet radio with a friend, so it was also the perfect excuse to make the radio website with a music player, social network timelines, a chat, a form to request songs and several similar things. I made a PHP system for the radio announcers using MySQL. I still have the code, and I'm sorry, all the people who registered there will have to forgive me, but the passwords were in plain text! I still had no idea what encryption meant.
Then I got to know the world of CMS. I created many sites with WordPress and E107, including the site of the largest Spanish audio game community, which is about 10 years old now, although I no longer maintain it. In fact, as I felt I was successful making websites, I posted ads offering website building services. I got an offer and stopped doing that. I hit hard with my big problem, design. My mom saved my ass that time, helping me late into the night to make everything I was doing look good. I was happy to have made money from web development, but at the same time a little sad to realize that I was hardly going to be able to make a website on my own if I wanted it to really look good.
Later on, procrastinating instead of doing my school work, I discovered the programming course book at my university a year before I went to study there. I read the whole thing and understood most of the theory. I could finally do more complex things in Python! That same year I participated in a C++ programming competition for high school students while going to a university programming workshop with other classmates. It was so great.
Then the following year I entered the university to study computer science, with a lot of fear. I never really liked courses with a lot of mathematics, hard sciences or humanities, I just wanted to program and look for business models to sell software. So I had a hard time passing those courses, it was so difficult. I was helped by many professors and friends, to whom I'm very grateful.
And even though I had to pass those courses, I never gave up web development. I was always with friends looking for projects to do. What's more, the same first year I entered the computer lab of the computer science department, where I learned a lot about system administration that went very much hand in hand with all that. It was my home for a long time.
My first introductory engineering project was a mix of Python with PHP, in fact, it's still in the commits, although the PHP part went to a better life to become Flask. I tried Firebase, then moved to Flask using Python and some vanilla JavaScript doing side projects with a friend. And one day, he came with something that Blew my mind, a headless CMS, Strapi. Just by declaring the models, it generates a REST API and GraphQL ready to consume with authentication and plugins included. I was no longer going to have to do back end, only front end! So then I dedicated myself to learn React, GraphQL, thinking that with that everything was going to be a piece of cake. Then I started another project and crashed with reality, everything is much more complex than it seems.
And while I was researching about other technologies to solve my need of finding my perfect toolbelt, I came to Shape Up, as luck would have it. I had just been getting to know a new Chilean roboadvisor, Fintual, and I saw this talk where they talked about their development methodology. They shared the link to the book and I read the whole thing that same night. I found it amazing, much more realistic than the theoretical classes they were teaching me about software development. So I kept researching about the company, then Basecamp, now 37signals, and for some reason I felt it clicked with the ideas. They talked a lot (and still do) about another way of doing things. Another way of looking at work, another way of looking at software development. I learned that they are the creators of Ruby on Rails. So I created a Basecamp account and when I tried it out I felt it was very carefully designed, note that I can't even see it. To me, this meant simple screens, much easier for me to understand. I began to imagine myself in a job like 37signals, where almost everything is written down, where everything is centralized in one place, where I would be almost forever free of whiteboards or presentations where I miss a lot of information because I can't see it. And besides, Basecamp worked super fast! How could it be that something made in Ruby on Rails could be so good? If everyone said it was obsolete, to choose microservices, to do a separate back end and front end, how could this be possible?
So at that moment I felt cheated. I started to doubt anything, I became very skeptical. And since the other ideas didn't quite fit in my head either, this was all I needed to give Rails a chance. I started a new application, read the guides from top to bottom and it all made perfect sense to me. I discovered the generators and realized I didn't need to write the same repetitive code I was writing in the other frameworks all the time. It was really a boom! And that first approach was using Rails only in API mode. I was still a gradualist and kept giving the benefit of the doubt to the separation between the two parts. I must admit that the hardest part was getting authentication with Devise to work securely, in fact, that keeps me to this day away from Devise. And it was also the first reason that started to slowly drive me away from React. I thought, why am I wasting my time on something that is supposed to be so trivial? Rails has already solved this.
With several more frustrations, now the opportunity went to Rails' Omakase menu. Delicious. Nothing is a panacea, but it felt much better. And I also gained control on the JavaScript side to make things much more accessible. What happened was that instead of studying for university exams, I was reading blog articles about Ruby and Rails all the time. I spent my hours looking at Rails pull requests, Hotwire and all the new stuff. I'd say it was pretty healthy procrastination after all, even though I then had to do all the things I really didn't want to do at the last minute. My head was already elsewhere, although to be honest, this also happened to me in high school.
Then I had the opportunity to do my internship at Profe.Social using Rails and Hotwire, something very weird in Chile. And when I finished, with a friend we programmed ment 100% in Rails and Hotwire. It's a Calendly style software, designed for independent professionals to control their agenda and have a record of their patients. It was a big challenge to deal with time zones, availabilities, holidays and time blocks, and above all, to start it from scratch. I learned a lot of lessons and it's a project that continues to work to this day. And in retrospect, I feel that the code is pretty decent for a first medium-sized project.
That same year, we did another project for a year-long course. In fact, we continued programming on it for quite some time afterwards, although it stalled. I took all my lessons learned from the previous project and many other interesting problems and challenges arose with real-time operations and many views for different contexts. I think at this point, my head stopped thinking about Python and finally switched to Ruby.
I finished university and only had a little experience working in a company, an internship. But I felt I could apply for jobs that asked for more experience. And I was lucky that Buk, a large human resources company in Latin America, believed in me. They hired me starting from level 2 in the platform team, using Rails. It was the best place I could have had to keep growing in Rails with very different challenges. I immediately started traveling the world, met amazing people and had the opportunity to go to the first Rails World conference in Amsterdam. That level of pressure made me step out of my comfort zone completely to improve my English, and at the same time I was encouraged to make open source contributions that I wouldn't have imagined doing so soon.
And then, I took the big leap. To that same place where I imagined myself working when I discovered Shape Up and Basecamp. 37signals! I made the leap to the company where the same people who inspired me all this time are. It's been weeks and I still can't take it all in. The application was a super intense process, where at first I applied thinking that I wouldn't have many chances, since surely of the hundreds of people who apply obviously there were going to be many better candidates than me. But little by little I progressed and I saw it as a more and more real possibility. I was anxious even when I was eating. I counted down each day for updates, until I finally read the offer letter while I was in my English classes. I'm so grateful to have this opportunity and that they trusted me as a programmer.
I wouldn't say a jump like this is normal in my environment, but I don't think I'm out of this world either. I'm just crazy in the head, and I think about software even when I'm sleeping. I can spend a whole weekend reading code and programming and I feel refreshed. It's been my passion for as long as I can remember, and I think that will always be the recipe for success, no matter what you define as success. Spending an absurd amount of hours doing what you love.
But this is just the beginning! Now it's time to prove to them that they were right to choose me, so it's a huge challenge for me, even more so being next to so many amazing people in everything they do.
And that's how a talk about an unknown methodology totally changed my life. That's why it bothers me to hear hateful comments about Rails, not because they offend me, but because they are probably discouraging many people from trying it, as it happened to me. And just as it happened to me, it might make sense to any other programmer to get to know Rails without being subjected to ridicule for choosing an obsolete technology, so obsolete that in less than 20 minutes tickets were sold out for the second Rails World in Toronto, where I'll be giving a talk on how to make accessible web apps with Rails and Hotwire! I'm convinced that accessibility is easier than it looks and I'll be there to prove it.
I think I've set the expectations a bit high on myself, so I'm a little nervous about these challenges, but I hope to rise to the occasion and do the best job of my career.
Long live to Ruby on Rails!
Some time later I got a laptop. My parents put Braille letters on the keyboard so I could learn to type. My dad taught me how to open games with keyboard shortcuts and I learned the menus by heart. Later he taught me how to type in Microsoft Word, and then my curiosity grew exponentially. I wanted him to teach me how to copy music to my MP3 player. He taught me how to use Skype to talk to my friends and how to get around the basics of Windows. And really, the basics were enough for me to keep exploring things. We had backups of the entire disk partition created with Norton Ghost in case I broke something, so I had total freedom to break things and learn. How could I forget Windows Live Messenger and Messenger Plus. I could even shut down the computer of those who had it installed just by sending them a command!
The next thing that kept me awake at night was learning how to browse the web, to be useful by searching things in Google, to be able to download some software and install it. I didn't rest until I did it and I remember that moment perfectly. But that wasn't enough either. Then I became obsessed with creating a website! Every time I turned on the computer, my first action was to Google, “how to create a website”, even when we went to play in the computer lab at school. Every time I got different results. I tried many services, many ways to do it, read many sites. In many cases I didn't understand anything but I was putting all the concepts together although I still don't know how, sometimes things just happen.
Then I came to the conclusion that a web page was a simple .html file and I could create it with Macromedia Dreamweaver. Without fear of breaking things, I discovered that an HTML was not like writing a Microsoft Word document, but that as I formatted the text, Dreamweaver converted it to the HTML code that corresponded. So I just had to play around a bit to figure out what each tag meant. It was awesome to make different kinds of headings, lists, links, inputs, buttons and hear my screen reader recognize them. I already had a local web page! Now I needed to know how to publish it on the internet.
Knowing that HTML was the basis of everything, it didn't take me long to discover the concept of web hosting. I found one that was great at the time and free, Nixiweb. I opened an account and created a hosting for a .net domain. They sent me the FTP connection details, I uploaded my HTML using FileZilla, logged into the domain and, it didn't work. Another problem.
Until I discovered domain names. I understood that you had to pay for that, but then I found another domain, .tk, from a small island in Oceania called Tokelau. They were offering free domains to become known, great strategy. I got my domain name, but I didn't understand how to connect it to my Nixiweb hosting. So in desperation and trying anything, I made it so that when I entered the domain it showed the HTML hosted in 🥁... Dropbox! Pretty crappy. But it felt like a real accomplishment for me. Barely 11 years old and I already had my website. I was already convinced that this was my passion, web development. A few weeks later I discovered DNS and was able to do it right.
At that time I had an internet radio with a friend, so it was also the perfect excuse to make the radio website with a music player, social network timelines, a chat, a form to request songs and several similar things. I made a PHP system for the radio announcers using MySQL. I still have the code, and I'm sorry, all the people who registered there will have to forgive me, but the passwords were in plain text! I still had no idea what encryption meant.
Then I got to know the world of CMS. I created many sites with WordPress and E107, including the site of the largest Spanish audio game community, which is about 10 years old now, although I no longer maintain it. In fact, as I felt I was successful making websites, I posted ads offering website building services. I got an offer and stopped doing that. I hit hard with my big problem, design. My mom saved my ass that time, helping me late into the night to make everything I was doing look good. I was happy to have made money from web development, but at the same time a little sad to realize that I was hardly going to be able to make a website on my own if I wanted it to really look good.
Later on, procrastinating instead of doing my school work, I discovered the programming course book at my university a year before I went to study there. I read the whole thing and understood most of the theory. I could finally do more complex things in Python! That same year I participated in a C++ programming competition for high school students while going to a university programming workshop with other classmates. It was so great.
Then the following year I entered the university to study computer science, with a lot of fear. I never really liked courses with a lot of mathematics, hard sciences or humanities, I just wanted to program and look for business models to sell software. So I had a hard time passing those courses, it was so difficult. I was helped by many professors and friends, to whom I'm very grateful.
And even though I had to pass those courses, I never gave up web development. I was always with friends looking for projects to do. What's more, the same first year I entered the computer lab of the computer science department, where I learned a lot about system administration that went very much hand in hand with all that. It was my home for a long time.
My first introductory engineering project was a mix of Python with PHP, in fact, it's still in the commits, although the PHP part went to a better life to become Flask. I tried Firebase, then moved to Flask using Python and some vanilla JavaScript doing side projects with a friend. And one day, he came with something that Blew my mind, a headless CMS, Strapi. Just by declaring the models, it generates a REST API and GraphQL ready to consume with authentication and plugins included. I was no longer going to have to do back end, only front end! So then I dedicated myself to learn React, GraphQL, thinking that with that everything was going to be a piece of cake. Then I started another project and crashed with reality, everything is much more complex than it seems.
And while I was researching about other technologies to solve my need of finding my perfect toolbelt, I came to Shape Up, as luck would have it. I had just been getting to know a new Chilean roboadvisor, Fintual, and I saw this talk where they talked about their development methodology. They shared the link to the book and I read the whole thing that same night. I found it amazing, much more realistic than the theoretical classes they were teaching me about software development. So I kept researching about the company, then Basecamp, now 37signals, and for some reason I felt it clicked with the ideas. They talked a lot (and still do) about another way of doing things. Another way of looking at work, another way of looking at software development. I learned that they are the creators of Ruby on Rails. So I created a Basecamp account and when I tried it out I felt it was very carefully designed, note that I can't even see it. To me, this meant simple screens, much easier for me to understand. I began to imagine myself in a job like 37signals, where almost everything is written down, where everything is centralized in one place, where I would be almost forever free of whiteboards or presentations where I miss a lot of information because I can't see it. And besides, Basecamp worked super fast! How could it be that something made in Ruby on Rails could be so good? If everyone said it was obsolete, to choose microservices, to do a separate back end and front end, how could this be possible?
So at that moment I felt cheated. I started to doubt anything, I became very skeptical. And since the other ideas didn't quite fit in my head either, this was all I needed to give Rails a chance. I started a new application, read the guides from top to bottom and it all made perfect sense to me. I discovered the generators and realized I didn't need to write the same repetitive code I was writing in the other frameworks all the time. It was really a boom! And that first approach was using Rails only in API mode. I was still a gradualist and kept giving the benefit of the doubt to the separation between the two parts. I must admit that the hardest part was getting authentication with Devise to work securely, in fact, that keeps me to this day away from Devise. And it was also the first reason that started to slowly drive me away from React. I thought, why am I wasting my time on something that is supposed to be so trivial? Rails has already solved this.
With several more frustrations, now the opportunity went to Rails' Omakase menu. Delicious. Nothing is a panacea, but it felt much better. And I also gained control on the JavaScript side to make things much more accessible. What happened was that instead of studying for university exams, I was reading blog articles about Ruby and Rails all the time. I spent my hours looking at Rails pull requests, Hotwire and all the new stuff. I'd say it was pretty healthy procrastination after all, even though I then had to do all the things I really didn't want to do at the last minute. My head was already elsewhere, although to be honest, this also happened to me in high school.
Then I had the opportunity to do my internship at Profe.Social using Rails and Hotwire, something very weird in Chile. And when I finished, with a friend we programmed ment 100% in Rails and Hotwire. It's a Calendly style software, designed for independent professionals to control their agenda and have a record of their patients. It was a big challenge to deal with time zones, availabilities, holidays and time blocks, and above all, to start it from scratch. I learned a lot of lessons and it's a project that continues to work to this day. And in retrospect, I feel that the code is pretty decent for a first medium-sized project.
That same year, we did another project for a year-long course. In fact, we continued programming on it for quite some time afterwards, although it stalled. I took all my lessons learned from the previous project and many other interesting problems and challenges arose with real-time operations and many views for different contexts. I think at this point, my head stopped thinking about Python and finally switched to Ruby.
I finished university and only had a little experience working in a company, an internship. But I felt I could apply for jobs that asked for more experience. And I was lucky that Buk, a large human resources company in Latin America, believed in me. They hired me starting from level 2 in the platform team, using Rails. It was the best place I could have had to keep growing in Rails with very different challenges. I immediately started traveling the world, met amazing people and had the opportunity to go to the first Rails World conference in Amsterdam. That level of pressure made me step out of my comfort zone completely to improve my English, and at the same time I was encouraged to make open source contributions that I wouldn't have imagined doing so soon.
And then, I took the big leap. To that same place where I imagined myself working when I discovered Shape Up and Basecamp. 37signals! I made the leap to the company where the same people who inspired me all this time are. It's been weeks and I still can't take it all in. The application was a super intense process, where at first I applied thinking that I wouldn't have many chances, since surely of the hundreds of people who apply obviously there were going to be many better candidates than me. But little by little I progressed and I saw it as a more and more real possibility. I was anxious even when I was eating. I counted down each day for updates, until I finally read the offer letter while I was in my English classes. I'm so grateful to have this opportunity and that they trusted me as a programmer.
I wouldn't say a jump like this is normal in my environment, but I don't think I'm out of this world either. I'm just crazy in the head, and I think about software even when I'm sleeping. I can spend a whole weekend reading code and programming and I feel refreshed. It's been my passion for as long as I can remember, and I think that will always be the recipe for success, no matter what you define as success. Spending an absurd amount of hours doing what you love.
But this is just the beginning! Now it's time to prove to them that they were right to choose me, so it's a huge challenge for me, even more so being next to so many amazing people in everything they do.
And that's how a talk about an unknown methodology totally changed my life. That's why it bothers me to hear hateful comments about Rails, not because they offend me, but because they are probably discouraging many people from trying it, as it happened to me. And just as it happened to me, it might make sense to any other programmer to get to know Rails without being subjected to ridicule for choosing an obsolete technology, so obsolete that in less than 20 minutes tickets were sold out for the second Rails World in Toronto, where I'll be giving a talk on how to make accessible web apps with Rails and Hotwire! I'm convinced that accessibility is easier than it looks and I'll be there to prove it.
I think I've set the expectations a bit high on myself, so I'm a little nervous about these challenges, but I hope to rise to the occasion and do the best job of my career.
Long live to Ruby on Rails!