About
Overview
- Member of Puentes (5% acceptance rate) by Antigravity Capital
- Set record time at Silver.dev technical interview (#1 of 440 software engineers)
- Built Game Finder (2,000+ downloads without advertising)
- Top 3 at Vibe a Startup hackathon
- Crowd-favorite presentation at ShipBA
Growing up in Buenos Aires (2007–2019)
I was born and raised in the neighborhood of Caballito, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 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 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 I check out this programming thing, to see whether I was interested in it. So I checked it out.
I started to learn programming in May 2020, when I was still 12, 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 has reached 2,000+ 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 with 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.
At around the same time I started with programming, I started reading non-fiction books. I used to read the books in my dad's bookshelf, such as Mathematics, Are You There?, by A. Paenza; The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, by S. Covey; Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by R. Kiyosaki; and Create or Die, by A. Oppenheimer. I then downloaded more books from the internet and spent all my money from birthday gifts to buy myself a Kindle. Looking back, all this reading shaped a good portion of my current mindset towards life overall. As detailed below, a clear example of this is how I've approached fitness.
Health issues (2018–2024)
In the middle of 2022, I started playing football again in another club. Simultaneously, my physique got weaker, notably paler, 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 due to absolute exhaustion. "It's so weird that you can't continue given your age and active lifestyle", he said. I agreed, but the only solution was to just keep pushing harder. Or at least that's what I believed and answered.
Given that I really wanted to get better at the sport and wasn't getting noticeable results, in the summer of 2024, I asked my coach what I could do to improve. He gave me a workout plan, consisting of timed sprints and jogging. I followed it analogous to how a religious devotee follows his God's mandates.
One sunny day of the 2024 summer holidays, with my family at Miramar, we went to the beach in the morning as usual. As on 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 going to the hospital for a checkup, given that I'd been having digestive issues over the last days.
This kid needs hospitalization and a blood transfusion.
What? I had just swum 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 a strict diet, I gained ~10 kg (I used to weigh 44 kg!), could jog for ~30 minutes straight, and my skin got normal. And not just for normal for me this time.
As the months passed, I continued improving even more. But beyond the physical aspect, this experience showed me how 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, as the habit of pushing myself hard to improve has remained within me, even if it isn't as necessary as it used to be. On top of that, it was very mind-opening: realizing that my aforetime indisputable belief was actually wrong was like realizing I'd been running with blinders and had them just removed, observing how the end goal had been next to me all the time, yet I wasn't able to see the big picture.
First commercial project (2024)
In that same year, when the school year started, 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 did 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 working without knowing whether I was going to get paid or not, until one day they called and asked 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. So, I had accumulated a total of $2,620 combined with my little life savings. Down to zero, I spent all the money I had and bought myself a MacBook and an iPhone, getting rid of the limitations of having to share the home PC with my brother and using a computer that crashed when running a few Docker containers.
I kept working for around 6 months more, in which I grasped the tech stack, gained experience turning client requests into features, and learned how to handle large projects.
Taking the leap (2025)
Silver.dev
Thanks to my dad's recommendation, since 2023, I've listened 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.
Around two years later, in February 2025, Gabriel published the founding engineer job position at his company, Silver.dev. This is my opportunity, I thought, although 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, while hanging out with some friends, I received an email inviting 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.
So, I got in as a software engineer intern. In the mornings, I still attended secondary school; in the afternoons, I worked at Silver. I've learned TypeScript & NextJS, product engineering, and how to work as part of a team rather than just on my own. Besides, I've realized what the other side of the interviews looks like.
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 a 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 as the best place to continue my life. I decided to give it a chance, now fully committed to going to college.
San Francisco
In September, Gadi told me he was about to announce the 2nd cohort of Puentes, which was taking place in October. He invited me, and I rejected it, reasoning that I planned to spend that month writing my college essays. Thankfully, a week later, Gabriel and Paske made me rethink the decision. They argued that not everyone had this opportunity, and that the alternatives were either to write the essays at school or write them after talking with Guillermo Rauch. I hadn't thought about it that way; they were right, so I followed their advice.
However, there wasn't much time left for the trip, and I didn't have a Visa yet. Luckily, I'm also a Spanish citizen thanks to my mum and grandma, so I didn't have trouble with it. So, at 18, I left my home country for the first time in my life.
I arrived at the US customs in Houston, Texas, and the security guard asked me the typical business or leisure question. Business, I said, though it wasn't completely one or the other. A few clicks and keystrokes later, he called a fat guy in uniform to go away with me. He took me to the famous little room, a place filled with people who seemed rather different from me—big tattooed guys who looked like crackheads. A few minutes later, the desktop guy called me and started investigating me. How can you be a software developer so young and without a degree?, he wondered. I explained to him briefly, he criticized the Silver website as a scam, and then let me go, given that I had nothing to hide and it was clear that I would return to Argentina in the short term.
Finally, I arrived in San Francisco, and the magic began. Biking through the famous bridge, self-driving cars, the beautiful architecture, the tech billboards, and all the incredible people I met from different origins, but shaped with the same Bay Area culture, where one's creativity and ability to make an impact matter more than anything else. What better example of this than Guillermo Rauch, whom I got the opportunity to meet. Besides, it was mind-bending discovering how common it is for millions of dollars to flow in and out of tech startups. Wrapping up: although the trip was just a little bit more than a week long, it radically reinforced my desire to stay for at least a few years more.
Today and tomorrow
Right now, I'm 18 years old, I've just finished secondary school, I'm still working at Silver (now full-time), and I'm awaiting my university admission answers. If I get in, I'd start in August 2026; so, until then, I have several months to work on cool things. I'll update this page as the story continues. See you.