From Yapamatico to the cloud

My family comes from two small towns in Falcón, Venezuela. On my mother's side, from Coro. On my father's side, from Yapamatico: a place almost no one has heard of, and one that only the family knows how to reach.

I grew up in Punto Fijo, an oil city. My first computer was a 286, and it was at the city's oil-industry schools that I wrote my first lines of code: LOGO, a turtle on the screen, and a handful of instructions that turned into shapes.

At 13 it stopped being a game. Because of economic circumstances I began programming and repairing computers—not as a hobby, but because it was needed. I learned the craft from the side where things are broken and have to be made to work with whatever is at hand.

At 17 I moved to Mérida to study Systems Engineering, and I paid for it by programming. Studying and working on the same subject has an advantage I took years to appreciate: everything I learned had to be useful that same week.

That journey left me with an idea I still use in architecture: almost everything I learned, I learned with fewer resources than the job required. So I do not see constraints as the obstacle to design—they are part of the design.

Today I work as a Solutions Architect at AWS, and I am an AWS Golden Jacket. The path from a 286 in Punto Fijo to here was not a straight line, and that is probably why this site insists on questions more than on answers.