Well, this will be this blog real first “post”.

I feel that, to really explain the things I want to write of in this place, there’s some kind of introduction needed, someplace where a visitor can read a bit about me and perhaps understand better the reasons for me saying whatever stupidity I’m currently saying.

First of all, I’m a computer engineer. In my country, in the way univerities work there, that means that I had a lot of theory of all things computer related (from software development and engineering, compiler’s theory, data structures, algorithms, artificial intelligence but also hardware design, electronics, robotics, signal treatment up to organization of a data center, enterprise administration and laws and down to physics, algebra, calculus, numeric and mathematical analysis…) but very little practice and almost no possibility of specialization (not even being able to focus more on software than hardware or vice versa). All the practice we had was a couple of laboratories focused on circuits and several programming exercises through the five years of classes.

Most of these classes where taught by people who stuck to some kind of book and didn’t wanted (or weren’t able) to go further than that or even counsel the alumni that wanted to learn more than what was in that book.

I began working on my second year, in a dot com company (this was the year 1999), and to me that was a complete new world with a lot of freedom to learn, to investigate and to propose ideas (I suppose that most people will find strange that I found more freedom to do this in a job than in class, but that’s how it felt like). It wasn’t long before I was on charge of small projects (and the only one working on them, for the most part), forcing and motivating me to study and learn much more than all the classes and teachers combined.

Then the dot com crisis came and this company folded (well, not really, it was bought by another, bigger company, but changed the way of working so much that the things that made me like it disappeared). I’ll probably talk again about this place in the future, we had some interesting ways of working that I’ve only heard of in other companies since then (Google, with their 20% of the employee’s time for other projects, for example, is one). At the same time, an opportunity came by to work on a big project for a car manufacturer, with applications and systems used worldwide, so I took it and had to deal with a completely different environment, full of legacy code and very strict rules.

Since them I’ve moved a lot: I’ve been in big companies and start-ups (one of them my own, only lasted two years, though), in green field projects and maintaining old legacy code, involved in simple internal web apps and huge banking systems, all in about ten years of experience, about the same number of companies and three different countries. I’ve always tried to see both the good and bad decisions taken in those companies and learn from them, sometimes I’ve even succeeded, I think… Well, I hope, at least, and will continue trying.

So here I am  now, with a good opportunity to try and set things up my way (look at my last post) and see if I’m better than all the managers and bosses I’ve been bitching about all these years. At least I hope I won’t be worse.