The last 15 years

December 17, 2025 • 8 min read

I was recently putting together a résumé-style page with everything I’ve done: studies, jobs, side projects. I tried to be exhaustive, so I went all the way back to university, before my pivot to software, and included a lot of half-cooked things too.

What surprised me is how much I’ve actually put out there over the years. Even when things weren’t fully formed.

In my teens, I wanted to be a musician. I had a band, recorded music, and that’s what pushed me to study audiovisuals at university. While most people in my class were into filmmaking or being on camera, I naturally gravitated toward sound. I did some gigs as a mic operator and was basically “the sound guy” of the group.

At some point during university, I realized I wasn’t going as deep into sound as I wanted, so I took an extra course at Sonopro, a sound engineering academy. That’s where things became more technical: sound recording, processing, signal flow. It helped a lot with my creative work — band recordings, some music production, and composition on the side.

When I graduated, I had this idea of building my own audiovisual events company. But first, I needed money. So I started taking more and more gigs as an audiovisual engineer. I still did creative work — corporate videos, OSTs — but live events paid the bills. Especially in Barcelona, where conferences and congresses generate a lot of AV work.

Eventually, I wanted a change. I left Barcelona and moved to Vancouver, where I worked as a live events audiovisual engineer at FMAV. After a few months, I realized I didn’t enjoy the immigration experience as much as I expected. I was nostalgic for my life back home, so I returned to Barcelona.

Back there, I stopped freelancing and focused on a company called Eikonos. I grew a lot and worked on big projects with major clients. But the long hours, travel, and constant pressure started to affect my mental health and personal life. After about a year, I quit.

I didn’t have a plan. I just knew I needed something different. That’s when I decided to try software.

I did a coding bootcamp at Codeworks Barcelona and got really into it. Turns out I really like building things. The bootcamp experience was very uneven — some of my peers got a lot out of it, others didn’t, and some couldn’t find jobs afterward. I was lucky. I went in knowing almost nothing and came out able to land a job pretty quickly.

A few weeks after graduating, I joined Curelator, a healthcare company, as a web developer. It was a small startup, around 20 people, semi-remote. The “office” in Barcelona was literally the CEO’s apartment. The engineering team was spread across Barcelona, other parts of Europe, and Canada.

I was surprised to learn people only went to the office two days a week. I actually wanted to go every day — I had just graduated and felt I needed maximum input. In hindsight, that setup forced me to become more independent. I learned ownership, accountability, and how to figure things out on my own.

One of my tasks was maintaining the company website, which was built with WordPress. I had never touched WordPress or PHP before. The main product was a single-page web app used by clinicians to see patient data synced from a mobile app. It had been built by previous engineers, and I was basically on my own maintaining and extending it.

I learned a lot, fast.

Because I only had to be in the office a couple of days a week, I started working remotely while traveling. Flights around Europe were cheap, so I’d spend a week in Stockholm, Munich, Amsterdam, Milan... It wasn’t full-time nomad life, but it gave me a taste of it.

Over time, I got promoted and my scope expanded. I moved beyond product work into more web platform projects: switching testing frameworks, changing client-side state management, things like that. After a couple of years, I had built a pretty wide base.

Later, I moved to Bogotá, Colombia, and kept working remotely. That period came with a lot of personal growth. I also started writing more: tutorials, technical posts, mostly on Medium. I thought I might make some money from it. I didn’t — maybe $10 per post.

I didn’t love how Medium worked either. Submitting posts to publications, waiting for approval, randomness. Some friends did extremely well — one was basically paying rent with Medium — but I eventually got tired of it and moved everything to my own blog. No monetization, just putting things out there.

At some point, I realized I was missing engineering fundamentals. The bootcamp taught me how to be productive and ship things, but I lacked deeper engineering foundations. I only knew JavaScript and some data structures, algorithms,etc but knew no low-level languages, no memory management, no real understanding of what was happening under the hood.

So I took Harvard’s CS50. That filled a lot of gaps: C, memory, pointers, file systems, binary. Things JavaScript hides from you. It cleared a lot of fog in my understanding of computer science.

After about three years at Curelator, I felt too comfortable. I wasn’t learning as much anymore. I started looking elsewhere, especially at products I actually used. Until then, I’d been working on healthcare tools for migraines — useful, but not something I personally used. That made it harder, for me at least, to feel connected to what I was building.

I applied to Pinterest. The interview process went really well, and I was happy with the offer. The only condition was that I had to move to Toronto.

So I did.

I joined Pinterest in 2021. It was a completely different world: larger company, more structure, more processes, more politics. Pinterest had gone public in 2017, so by the time I joined, a lot of things were already in place. I had to learn how to operate in that environment — including what an engineering manager actually does. In my previous job, my “manager” had been the CTO.

Despite that, it was great. Smart people, interesting problems, and working on a product I actually used. Seeing your changes shipped to millions of users is stressful at first, then motivating. The perks didn’t hurt either — Silicon Valley companies take pretty good care of their employees.

I was hired into the Shopping team and worked on the “Your Shop” page in 2021. Later, I moved into Search, building modules on the search surface. After a couple of years, I went through the promotion process to senior, which was intense. I took on extra responsibilities, worked across teams, and led larger projects.

One of them was making the Pinterest grid support modules that span two columns — something that wasn’t possible before. Another was working on the Pin Builder, the surface where users publish pins. New codebase, new team. It went well, and I got promoted.

I’ve been at Pinterest for four years now. These days, I work on core grid representation — a pretty critical part of the product. Still a lot to learn, still interesting.

Looking back at the last 15 years, there’s a clear pattern: I like making things. Music, video, software — it changes with the phase of my life, but the impulse is the same. I’ve always done side projects, side studies, experiments.

A lot of people are worried about AI replacing their jobs. I’m not that worried. I like building. Even if the tools change — even if most of the code is written with LLMs — the act of shaping something, guiding it, deciding what to build still excites me. Acting as a product manager for an LLM feels natural to me.