Category: Uncategorized

Back in March, I decided I was going to resume writing for this blog because I wanted to get better at it. I felt that losing the habit of constantly writing my thoughts made me lose the ability to communicate effectively.

With the COVID pandemic raging, I allocated every Saturday morning to writing and I sat in front of my computer, some times literally for hours before I was able to come up with something to write about. I was determined to create the habit of writing even if that meant forcing it to happen.

I don’t know if this is the right way of doing it or not, but it is working for me. I feel like every Saturday when I sit down to write, the ideas and words flow more and more easily as time passes.

This has been my technique for creating “good” habits all my life. I forced myself to make things I initially rarely enjoyed until they became a habit and stopped being a pain.

The second step of this endeavor is to study how professional writers write, how they express their voices in a way that doesn’t seem copied or regurgitated from someone else’s writing, how do they make the experience of reading them feel fresh.

It’s going to be a long journey for sure, maybe it’ll take years until I become any good. No one is reading me right now but that’s fine because I am already feeling the improvements and that’s enough feedback for me to continue down this path. Anything that is good in life takes effort.

I am determined to come out of this pandemic better than when I entered it.

The world can be an unfair place where you don’t always get what you deserve and where you don’t get points just for trying.

I’m sure that at least once in your life you had the feeling that you worked harder than someone else and yet you didn’t get that thing you wanted despite deserving it more. It’s a strong feeling that can create resentment towards people or life if you don’t learn to understand why it happens.

There are a lot of unfair advantages that people are born with that are not even considered when it comes to comparing people’s achievements in life. A person born into a wealthier family has access to better opportunities than another person without that fortune but when weighting their life achievements this is never acknowledged making it an apples-to-oranges kind of comparison in detriment of the self-esteem of the less fortunate person who probably had to fight much harder to get where they got.

The people that had to work hard only to get to the point where other people started life deserve more recognition and more praise. We live in a society that doesn’t care about your struggles and will judge you in a biased way putting you—as a lightweight fighter—in the same ring to fight the sorts of Mike Tysons and then shame you when you lose.

This entire situation can make you feel like you already lost without even having started making you not even want to try but it is important that you fight this feeling and find the motivation to work hard, not to prove society wrong, but to prove yourself you are capable of achieving great things.

We might not become the next Elon Musk, but it cannot be for lack of trying. Even if we don’t get there the journey will very much be worth it.

There were times when I felt unfit for running my own business and for leading the people working with me. I looked for answers online and everyone here seemed much more prepared than I was, with much more experience and having gotten in my position 10 years earlier than me. I didn’t realize back then that I was comparing the peak of their careers against mine that was just getting started. You probably are too.

Remember these thoughts when you feel bad about your own career or when reading TechCrunch or Forbes makes you feel like an underachiever. Don’t let the unfair world discourage you and keep on giving a good fight.

Learning computer programming changed my life.

I remember I wanted to become a programmer after watching Hackers (so cliché) in the late 90s and later I felt even stronger about it after The Net, a movie with the same thematic but much less “technical”. I’m not making this up when I say my career choice came from watching two Hollywood films 🤷‍♂️.

I don’t remember exactly the time when I watched those movies—it was around 1998 more or less—but I do remember the sudden spike in interest about computers I had that remained uninterrupted since that time, 22 years ago.

In those years, my family was not financially well and we couldn’t afford a computer so I had to wait five years to have a second hand Intel 486 DX2 with 500 MB hard drive, and 32 MB of RAM running Windows 98. In was already 2003 and my first computer was a relic.

I recall it was so old that even Windows 98 ran slow on it not to mention I couldn’t play the newest games my friends were playing so I was stuck with it playing DOS-only games.

That same year, a classmate of mine lent me a Quick Basic book his brother was using at university that I read from cover to cover that same year spending hours and hours writing silly programs that book thought me. I was having the time of my life with that computer and that book.

In 2007 I bought my first laptop—a Dell Vostro 1500—and a year later, in 2008, I was finally able to afford to have an Internet connection at home. It was such an event that I even took a picture of that laptop with Google open to perpetuate that moment in time forever.

My shitty first computer and that book forced me to learn how to code. No Internet access and no games made my only option for entertainment to watch boring TV or to try to do something more interesting out of that boredom. Fortunately, that book was there at the right time and it thought me a skill I was able to monetize later to better my life.

It’s interesting to look back in time connecting the dots to see that something that looked like a misfortune, not to be able to afford a computer, was actually a good thing that made me discover my love for computer programming and computers in general, a profession that I ended up choosing to pursue as a career for the rest of my life.

I’m sharing this story because I believe that everyone should contemplate the idea of learning how to code, but especially the ones coming from unprivileged countries, with no access to good education or struggling financially.

Programming can teach how to think structurally, abstract yourself from a problem, give you a shot at reaching audiences bigger than you can imagine and it has the potential of altering your life for the better in a relatively short period of time.

It takes a long time to be truly good at something so you better start today. The demand for programmers is only growing and 5 years from now you will wish you had started today.