Last month was the 20th anniversary of my professional career in the IT world (actually it was 24 years of work but I used to work in another field).

I want to thank everyone who was part of my journey and let them know that all the relationships and experiences have been positive for me. From all of them I take with me something that has made me allow myself to form and “curtirme” (as we say in Argentina) to be who I’m today.

I want to take advantage of this post to tell a little bit of my history and what my career has been.

Thank you very much to all of you!

The Beginning

First thing I remember related to the world of technology and programming, is that since I was a child I loved to disassemble any mechanical or electrical device to know how it worked and to make experiments with its parts, it came me out naturally. I have burned devices from my house that I later fixed, broke my sisters’ toys and did many crazy things (I’m still be the “repairman” technician of anything for my family and friends).
I also liked space a lot and my father (a specialist in economics) gave me an encyclopedia of space maps, with which I did calculations and looked at the sky looking for something in “the beyond”.
Luckily I have had a computer since I was very young, at the age of 4 my father bought a new Commodore128 of ’86 just released to the market, one of the few sold in Argentina.

At that same age, he taught me how to use the computer. I used to play chess (my father taught me one year before) and soccer games in the Commodore. I also had an Atari 2600 JR that my father gave me the same year and where I spent much of my childhood playing classic games.

My father used to use the Commodore for his work and used calculation and sheets tools. The one I most remember was called “Multiplan”, the grandfather of spreadsheets. I think that’s where I learned how to do math and calcs and that’s why I must have such ease with it.

My father is also a curious person and bought many computer books to learn. I also read since I was 4 years old and I remember that one of the first things I read were those books. He had a collection called “Mi Computer”.

I was fascinated by that encyclopedia. I had it complete and I loved the diagrams and pictures of computers and disassembled devices and understanding what they were doing. The encyclopedia published sentences and algorithms in different programming languages. When they were in BASIC language, I copied them (they were several pages!!) and tested them on the Commodore. It drove me crazy!. I don’t remember the exact age but I must have been between 8 and 11 years old (because I remember in which house I lived in), I started to make my first algorithms and I built a video-game of a labyrinth where a labyrinth was drawn on the screen with a small player of pixels driven by the cursor keys, you had to escape by one of the ends of the labyrinth at the corners.

The middle times

After that, entering to teenage, I have not been very close to technology, since I started to dedicate myself to sports competitions (soccer, handball, volleyball, fencing, swimming and chess) and I started to be very passionate to the music. Occasionally or with my cousin or friends, I only played video games. But I had computer sciences at schools and did some easy programming (with LOGO) I love to build formulas to draw symmetrical images and learn much more about office tools like word processing and sheets.

I was one of the few in my school that already had a PC, the only thing I remember is using it for video games, chatting in ICQ with the others that had from my school and having an email account from mail.com (it’s my official account since 1995 and it’s the one I use, I had read on the internet that the service was launched and that they gave away accounts).

Also, at 1996 (15 years old) I start to work doing some extra-school jobs (internships programs and also work helping with my father) and after my father business crisis (end of ’90) on Argentinian great depression, I started to work as accounting assistant at some companies to help my family (the ease with calcs help me a lot). At 1999 while I was soccer player and was learning music, also I was working. At the end of the high-school I had doubts, whether to study music at the conservatory or study geophysical sciences and astronomy. Studying Geophysical Sciences had a drawback, it only available in the city of La Plata (UNLP), at 50km from my city and I had to continue working. I like the challenges, so, I chose Geophysical Sciences and Astronomy. In the admission course and evaluation I was the 4th best average, after that year and for many years no one else can enter at this faculty because of how difficult that this course and this evaluation was.

My career begins: Study and freelance time

Geophysical sciences and astronomy like me a lot but the social chaos at the critical moment in Argentina, prevented me from traveling between university and work, the first “piquetes” appeared (so difficult with 50km in the middle).
I began to have doubts about what to do and if the career had a future in this country (my father insisted me that I need to look for another career because he saw conditions on me to do many other things and that career could only have job offers at others countries). One day he said me “You are good at technical level, you have to look around there, think about it, I will financed you a certification career course that I saw, related to telecommunications and computer networks, I think it’s the future”. This is how I started in IT and certified in Cisco and got my degree in Computer Network Technician.
This revived my old passion for technology, and I decided to study Computer Systems at UTN. While studying my programming professor fascinated with my questions and my way of programming, he asked me to help him at his work on some projects (with Java language and JavaDataStore) and then he got me a job as a network technician for another electronics professor of UTN. At 20 years old I designed and built the computer network of the “Once Train Station“. While studying (I learnt COBOL, Java, C/C++, VB6, MSSQL, HTML, JavaScript), I was doing freelance network and hardware jobs, doing installations and fixing computers and devices. While I was generating clients and began to realize how to sell software to them, I began to build my first product applications to be able to sell them (I bought a book of VB6 and Delphi and learnt a lot to how build desktop applications). At 2001 I already had several products: PedidosExpress, StockControlExpress, AgendaExpress, SPA (for industrial machines), SalariosExpress, FacturasExpress, InmobiliariasExpress, and another ones (VB6, VB.NET, MSSQL, etc). Also, I built some websites from companies.
At 2003 I finished my studies at UTN and then dedicated my time to work in IT industry.
This is how I started my freelance life giving all kinds of services (I use a lot VB6 and then VB.NET because I have a lot of clients with Windows PC‘s). It was difficult for me at that age to get people who could work with me either by experience or by confidence (technology was a particular niche at that time and those of us who were in it did good business). And then with the arrival of my first daughter, my business was complicated, my activity between selling, giving service and collecting payments was a hard time. Everything that happened to me at that time helped me a lot, because when you are on the boat sailing, you cannot find the way to stop and distribute the work, my wife helps me a lot with some of the administrative tasks, but it got complicated and I couldn’t stop and organize myself. I decided to make a cut and start working in a dependency relationship.

The early stages

I started out as a technician, installing networks, fixing computers, installing and selling software, programming applications, doing the same thing I had been doing as freelance, but “financed” by an employer. This left me more time for my family and to work with a schedule and organize my life. I spent time reading programming books and continuing to study on my own. I started to specialize in Microsoft languages, I started with some VisualC++ and J# (Java Sharp) and I wanted to follow the Microsoft path, because I saw that Microsoft always get the best of everything that was around and exploited it in a new Microsoft product to the market.
At 2001 when the first version of .NET came out (very similar to Java and I was working on Java), I found a place to specialize and many books and a lot of Microsoft documentation on the Internet.

Reaching the 20th anniversary

When I started doing a lot of applications on my own (I even took a course to program AXIS IP cameras and then developed a digital surveillance application), I decided to start looking for a job or a way to provide services, that was the way how I got a job ONLY as a developer.
I built all kind of applications, from my first massive web applications, to core banking applications. I learned a lot at that stage.
This drove me to get other jobs and continue getting challenges, that’s how I came to the now known company that develops “Los Creadores“, at that time, we designed and built the famous website “Aula365” and many other great things. It was one of my best jobs and I learned a lot in it and started to develop my leadership skills.

Then I was working in many other companies, in many areas such as: health, insurance, banking, retail, e-learning, financial, massive websites, laboratories, metallurgical, oil, plastic industries, telecommunications, government, pharmacies, post office, legal and other severals industries.
I trained and qualified myself by certifying several courses, both technical and soft skills.
And I had roles as fullstack dev, consultant, technical reference, development leader, team leader, solution architect, integrations architect, technology manager, technology director, software factory management, devops and release manager.

If you are interested in learning something about computers, technology or programming, or you want some of my consulting services, either privately or for your company, do not hesitate to contact me!