Nicolás Pujia

About

Me

Overview

Growing up in Buenos Aires (2007–2019)

I was born and raised in the neighborhood of Caballito, Buenos Aires, Argentina, on August 2007, in a middle-class family with my brother, 3 years older than me, and two parents, both graduated system engineers from the UTN.

My life as a kid was fairly normal. Football has been my favorite sport, and Minecraft my favorite video game. I started playing football at a club when I was 7 and stayed there for 5 years. At around 10, I have a very clear memory, lying in my bed upside down, daydreaming about becoming a professional player when I grew up. However, I wasn't built for that: even though I had a healthy lifestyle, I was quite skinny and rather pale. I used to think that was just normal for me, until years later I realized it was not.

Discovering programming (2020–2023)

2020 arrived with the pandemic and my last year at primary school (7th grade). A few months locked in and many hours spent playing computer games, I started to question what I was spending my time on. At around the same time, my dad had suggested me to check about this programming thing, to see whether I was interested in it. So I checked it out.

I started to learn programming in May 2020 mostly with YouTube videos (ChatGPT didn't exist yet) and by creating simple scripts with Python. One day, wondering how to get out of the terminal environment and display actual graphics, I discovered pygame; tutorials here, pygame docs there, I made some small prototypes until by November I built my first video game ever.

I've really enjoyed building stuff, so I continued to develop more projects. Until the age of 16, I kept building personal projects, including, among others: a speedrun platformer game Jueguito Piola, made with Godot Engine, which triggered competition among my classmates; a game discovery app Game Finder, made with Dart & Flutter, which reached 1k+ downloads on the Google Play Store and keeps getting new users every day; and an online, real-time, multiplayer game Biome Fighters, made with Python & FastAPI and Godot Engine, which led me to participate in BackdropBuild v3. Regarding Game Finder, it was surprising: the only advertising of the app was its presence on the store and me sharing it to my reduced group of friends; nevertheless, it's been growing (even without updates) since then.

That's how I learned to program, basically; I used to decide to build X, which required me to learn Y in the process, and I'd also try to make each project different than the previous one in terms of learning, so each of them could teach me something new. Besides, as I grew up during my teens, my interest shifted increasingly more to programming.

Health issues (2018–2024)

In the middle of 2022, I started playing football again in another club. Simultaneously, my physique got weaker, notoriously pale, and more underweight.

As an anecdote, in the club we once did an endurance test; I was the worst one, even among the category below mine. Another time, my dad and I went for a run to the park and, after just 6 minutes of slow, non-stop jogging, I had to sit down on the floor because of absolute exhaustion. Given that I really wanted to get better at my sport, I used to push myself quite hard, thinking that I had to train way more and way harder.

One sunny day of 2024 summer holidays, with my family at Miramar, we went to the beach in the morning as usual. As any other day, we enjoyed the atmosphere, spent time relaxing, and I swam in the sea. In the afternoon, because it got cloudy, my mum suggested to go to the hospital for a checkup, given that I was having digestive issues the last days.

This kid needs hospitalization and blood transfusion.

What? I had just swam in the sea that morning. But, indeed, in the following days we came back to our home city; I got hospitalized and, after a few days, I was (thankfully) diagnosed with celiac disease. Thankfully because, despite consuming everyday food like bread or pizza severely damages my intestine, after just two months of strict diet, I gained ~10 kg, could jog for ~30 minutes straight, and my skin got normal (and not just for normal for me this time). After six months I was able to jog for 80 minutes straight, and within less than a year people even began complimenting my physique. But more importantly, I've noticeably felt much better since then, with a lot more energy and simply better overall.

Beyond the surface, this experience taught me that sometimes you don't realize how bad your current state is until you start to be at a decent, actually normal level. It also made me very disciplined over time, both before and after discovering my disease; before because the habit of pushing myself hard to improve remained within me, even if it's not as necessary as it used to be; and after because now I have to be strict with my diet, something that I tend to translate to discipline in exercise and sleep. Being strict, in addition, induces me to appreciate much more some things that are usually taken from granted.

First commercial project (2024)

School year started, and a friend of mine told me that his father's company, Siderplast S.A., was looking to rebuild their ERP system and online store from scratch, given that they were getting very archaic. I talked with my friend's brother, who was in charge of the management, and he told me that if I made a good job, they'd pay me well. Just with my experience of building little apps and games, I accepted the challenge.

Previously, I had only touched backend in a project using FastAPI, but I decided to use Django (which I had just completed the docs tutorial a month ago) as it seemed a better fit for the requirements of the project.

Three months passed in working without knowing whether I was going to get paid or not, until one day they call me and ask me how much I wanted to charge. Without much of an idea, I made a quote and got 10% more than I had asked for.

I kept working for around 6 months more, in which I mastered the tech stack, gained experience turning client requests into actual features, and learned how to handle large projects.

Taking the leap (2025)

Silver.dev

Thanks to my dad's recommendation, since 2023 I'd listen to the Tecnología Informal podcast. I genuinely liked the way of thinking of the author, Gabriel Benmergui. My favorite episode is, not coincidentally, El Programador de Hierro (The Iron Programmer, in English), where he compares the attitudes of two contrasting programmer archetypes: the iron one, who wants to get good just for the sake of it, is eager to win, and listens to those who point his errors; and the wooden one, who is conformist, only does the job for the money, and is defensive against those who tell him that he's bad. I mention it in detail because I really resonate with the idea of living with the iron attitude.

Two years later, Gabriel published the founding engineer job position at his own company, Silver.dev. This is my opportunity, I thought, despite I didn't meet the requirements (not even the working hours, since I was still attending school in the mornings). But I applied, anyway. A few days later, in February, while hanging out with some friends, I received an email calling me to the live coding interview. That alone was very surprising, given my poor experience for the role. But apart from that, the email detailed the problems I had to solve, something that looked strange to me (what's the point of the interview then? Everyone will pass it!, I used to think). Ignoring my confusion, I just practiced those problems until I could solve them in time.

The interview day arrived and, indeed, I had to solve the problems I had practiced. Only one of the two, actually, so I solved the problem in half of the available time. To my great surprise, that was record time, so Gabriel was fascinated and hired me as an intern. I'd later discover that it was my answer to "Why are you interested in this position?" that attracted his attention in the first place, and that I had practiced way more than usual for the interview. And no: not everyone (not even the majority of people) passes the interview even if you detail the problems in the email.

So, I got in as a software engineer intern. In the mornings, I still attended secondary school; in the afternoons, I worked at Silver. During my time there, I learned TypeScript & NextJS and, moreover, how to work as part of a team, rather than just on my own. Besides, I realized what the other side of the interviews look like and how common it is not to practice for the interviews.

Hackathons

In March, I participated in my first hackathon ever, ShipBA, alongside the only programmer friend I knew by that time and my cousin. Without sleeping, we built Noticiar, a TikTok-like AI-powered news app. Although we didn't win the competition, a bunch of people liked my presentation so much that they later invited me to more events, where I met even more people involved in the tech world.

In July, at my second hackathon, Vibe a Startup, I placed third with my team by assembling and presenting Nuvem Voice (a.k.a. el coso del cosito project), a customer service AI voice agent.

Besides the cool projects, the people I met in these events would later influence my decisions and considerably help me throughout the rest of the year.

University Admission

Being my senior year at school, I had to decide what I wanted to do afterwards, just as any other teen. At first, given that I had already made money programming, I was doubting whether to go to college or not. To figure it out, I was suggested to clarify to myself who I wanted to become in 5 or 10 years. What was clear to me was that I wanted to build cool stuff. To that end, both options were fine; however, one of them was clearly better done at that age than later. Still, I wasn't completely sure to commit to that decision yet.

My college alternatives were mainly two: the free and public UBA, recommended by my parents and teachers, where my brother had gone to and I had even completed 3 subjects the year before; and perhaps, if I could earn a scholarship, the expensive ITBA, recommended by Gabriel, where many people I met at ShipBA were studying.

Fortunately, among the people I've met this year, Santiago and Gadi (both of whom I met thanks to ShipBA) encouraged me to study in the US at Stanford or some Ivy, something that hadn't crossed my mind until then. At first, it sounded quite unrealistic (how could I, just a student at a school in Caballito, possibly get admitted to such university?). But Gadi connected me with Lichu, an Argentinian who had gotten into Stanford, who showed me that, while not easy, it wasn't an irrational idea. Thus, a third alternative had emerged on the table. Considering that Stanford, particularly Silicon Valley, is the global center for technology and innovation, I viewed it like the best place to continue my life on. I decided to give it a chance, now fully committed to going to college.

Today and tomorrow

Right now, I'm still working at Silver, about to finish secondary school, and trying to get into Stanford. Once that's done, I'll be building Game Finder v2. This month I'm travelling to San Francisco, so more about that later. Looking forward, I'll just say that I aim to keep building things people want. I'll update this page as the story continues. See you 👋🏻