Ragosorio

In 2020 I was thirteen, living in Guatemala City with my grandfather and my sister. I loved Minecraft, staying up too late on calls with friends, and being told I spent too much time on the computer.

The computer deserves an introduction. It was a 2017 Mac that belonged to my sister first — she made her first designs on it, kept her photos on it, built pieces of her life on it. My grandfather bought it from her and handed it to me, to study.

Here is the thing about my grandfather: he was famously careful with money. He interrogated every purchase, and mine was no exception — of course he asked me whether I really needed it. But my sister needed the money, I needed the computer, and between the two of us we talked him into it. Coming from him, buying it for me was practically a declaration of love.

I didn't understand it then, but that machine came with an inheritance. My sister had made her first real things on it, and now it was my turn to make something with it that was worth it.

That school year, our technology class started teaching us raw HTML. Open a notepad, type these tags. I had no idea what a tag even was. I was learning it live, like everyone else.

Then styles arrived — crammed inline, inside the same tags, inside the same file (very technical stuff). One day I found myself staring at roughly six hundred lines of HTML with styles stuffed into it, and every instinct I had said the same thing: this is too big. This should be split into separate files. I was almost sure of it.

This was before ChatGPT existed. Being almost sure meant YouTube tutorials, forums, and Google searches after midnight. So that's what I did — and I found out I was right. Structure goes in one file. Styles go in another. Cramming them together was considered bad practice in the real world.

So I did what any thirteen-year-old with a burning need to be right would do. I told the teacher. "Miss, I looked into it — HTML and CSS are supposed to be separate files. And to move the skeleton's muscles, there's a whole language called JavaScript."

She scolded me. I was getting ahead of myself. This was a class for beginners. It was nice that I researched on my own, but it wouldn't help me, because all of this was much more complex than I thought. I needed to slow down.

Something changed inside me when she said that. A loop switched on: I'd investigate to prove her wrong, find something better, get scolded again, investigate harder. Somewhere inside that loop I discovered React, discovered there was a whole new world out there, and the loop quietly stopped being about her. I stopped arguing in class — not because I gave up. Because by then I liked it too much to share it. It was mine.

My first real page was for my best friend at the time, Christa. A page about our friendship — our stories, our videos — built with everything I knew: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a little React I mostly didn't understand.

That page no longer exists. I didn't know Git existed. It was lost along with that first computer, and today it lives only in my memory, where it is honestly terrible: badly structured, badly designed. I loved it.

All this time, my grandfather watched me spend hour after hour on the machine he'd given me. He didn't understand what I was doing on it. To be fair, neither would you — half of it was programming, half of it was Minecraft. I was thirteen.

By then he was very sick, and you could tell. He took a trip to his hometown — a place with almost no internet, which I now suspect is exactly why he loved going. I stayed behind for online classes. And because I was thirteen: I didn't want a village, I didn't want a forest, I didn't want to meet a snake. Today the place I most want to go is somewhere with no technology at all. Two days of quiet. His kind of quiet. It took me six years to understand that trip.

While he was away, I decided to build the best thing I had ever made, so that when he came back I could finally show him what all those hours were. It had fireworks animated in JavaScript and CSS. It said, in every way a thirteen-year-old can say it: this is what I do. I'm not wasting my time. This can even become something someday.

He never came back from that trip.

I never got to show him.

Sometimes I wonder what he would have said... well, that was before he kicked the bucket.

After he died, I stopped programming. For a whole year I wrote exactly one piece of code: animated fireworks, for a girl I liked. Apparently fireworks are my love language. Remember her — she comes back later.

When I returned, I returned different. I started studying how to make things look good — I didn't know the words "UI/UX" yet; to me it was just "designing something beautiful." I started posting everything I made on Instagram. And I wrote little prank scripts for my friends: endless alert boxes yelling you've been hacked! — always with a built-in expiry date, because I wanted to scare them, not ruin them. I was fourteen. Comedy was simpler then.

The pranks did something I didn't expect: my friends realized I could do things they couldn't. So when school finally started teaching JavaScript — the language I'd taught myself a year earlier — and I was finishing exercises stupid fast, they came to me. And I became a business. I sold homework. Let me introduce my two ways of making quick money before ChatGPT existed: for myself, the most complex, optimal solution possible, to show the teacher that year of "slow down" had not been wasted. For my clients, believable beginner code, each version different, so nobody would get caught. My first income ever.

Then, in 2023, the fireworks girl messaged me on Discord: "I need a website. How much? It's called Metanoía." She was running for vice president of her school, her friends wanted a campaign site, and they wanted me to build it. I charged three hundred quetzales (about $40, so you don't have to google it). The page was beautifully ugly — I was mixing everything I was learning and it showed — and I was proud of it for months. But something clicked that had never clicked before: people pay for this.

After that, the world cracked open. ChatGPT appeared and studying stopped being a lonely sport. I found Awwwards, Behance, GitHub — I learned you could publish pages for free and I published everything. I paid for courses with savings I had that hurt so much to spend, and my sister paid for another course (P.S. thanks, dear sis... sarcasm, but ily fr). I tried everything and four things stuck: hacking, artificial intelligence, cryptography — and above all of them, the web.

The Instagram posts worked. One day I got a message from an American founder building a B2B startup — websites, systems and automations for businesses in the US. It was called NexaZen. I liked his idea so much that I made him an offer with all the audacity of my sixteen-year-old self: "Pay me $300 and I'll help you build your company." Two payments of $150. He said yes.

I worked with him for almost two years. He'd ask me questions and I'd answer in fluent developer; he taught me to answer in human — client language, emotional language. He taught me how people decide, why they say no, what a business actually needs from a website. He gifted me courses. Somewhere along the way we stopped being a client and a contractor and became friends. If you're reading this, my friend: thank you. You know who you are.

The second call came by Instagram DM: "Hey bro, we saw your project. Thirty minutes, let us introduce ourselves. We don't know how to say this — it's not a scam." It was four Spaniards, three of them from the Canary Islands. Today one of them is an influencer; the others, last I heard, are at Google, Meta and Apple. Back then they were founding a startup, and they offered me a contract: real money, in euros, if it worked out.

My seventeen-year-old self was about to do his school internship hours, you know... the boring kind. My school — virtual by then — required them to be in person, and even though I spent almost a month negotiating to do them virtually, with SPANIARDS, their answer was no.

In our last meeting, the wildest programmer I had ever talked to walked me through what they were going to build. Automating any process you can imagine — and not just reacting to things happening, but acting first. Proactive systems. I had no words. In thirty minutes I saw exactly how far I still was from the developer I wanted to become. My chip flipped for the second time in this story.

I thanked them and said no. It felt like closing a door that would never open again — I was sure that was the one chance of its kind I'd ever get. I was wrong. But we'll get there.

I still needed that internship. I told my old friend — the NexaZen founder — about the whole mess, and through a contact of his father I ended up writing to the IT director of Universidad Francisco Marroquín. They took me in.

I had never in my life traveled at four in the morning to be somewhere at a fixed hour and leave at a fixed hour. It flattened me. I loved it anyway. I met cathedra professors, learned how working technologists actually spend their days, and built my first big application in PHP — a language I did not know and, I discovered, do not love. Nah, it's a fine language — the way the industry uses it is another conversation. I built the app well anyway, and as far as I know, they were impressed.

I also collected my first professional disagreement. One of the programmers there — a professor — said something worked one way. I had researched that exact thing for a long time, and I knew that in the broad case I was right. But his point was real in specific contexts. So for the first time in this story, the kid who confronted his teacher chose the other move: I conceded. And instead of winning an argument, I won a mentor. That same professor later offered me a path into Universidad Galileo, with a job at the university to pay the tuition. Working to pay for studying meant earning nothing, and I had no cushion. I said no again. That one stung too.

And there was Pedro, my tutor. Pedro didn't teach me the technical. Pedro taught me the life of an adult who programs. One thing he said has followed me ever since:

Adult life arrived with two open problems: no university, no job. In my country, getting either is hard. Getting both at once is almost greedy. My family — by then, my sister and my brother-in-law, two people I love with everything — told me: whatever you choose, we've got you.

I wanted the Universidad de San Carlos — the USAC, the public university. Its entrance exams are the national benchmark for "difficult," and I knew it. I passed the basics cleanly. Then came the specifics, the hard ones. I studied eleven days without stopping.

Meanwhile I was sending my CV everywhere. Recruiters from other countries asked, "This is a semi-senior role — are you sure you can do it?" and I said yes with the confidence of someone who had memorized architectures he'd never run in production. And a company called ROO Guatemala called me in: one technical interview, where I showed everything I'd built — by then it included a Christmas booking platform that seven hundred families had used — and one business interview, where I basically told them this exact story. They said: we'll call you.

The night before the exam results, I cried. I was sure I had failed, and failing meant no university at all — the private ones cost more per month than the USAC costs in years. Then the results came. Both specifics: APPROVED. I was in. Ingeniería en Sistemas. I cried much more that night, for the opposite reason.

Then ROO called back: yes — but with a schedule that collided head-on with the university schedule I'd already been assigned. I laughed, because I literally could not do it. Then I said yes anyway, and did the near-impossible: got my university schedule changed. Part-time junior developer, full-time student. Both glories.

Working and studying at the same time is exhausting. Horrible. If you can spare yourself, spare yourself — that's the most honest advice I can give you. I couldn't spare myself, so...

I was hired as a junior, assigned to a CRM. At some point I simply stopped waiting to be told what to do: if something could be better and broke nothing, I changed it. I told my boss about every improvement I saw, every architecture I thought was stronger. A query that took thirty seconds started taking one. When my boss understood what was happening, he handed me almost total control of the project — and the CRM outgrew its own name. It became a Sales Operations Layer — a fancy name for “it does everything now.”

And then the circle closed. I built a workflow architecture — triggers, actions, complex flows, programming without programming: you describe visually what should happen, and the system does it. Messages answered automatically, sellers assigned, events created, notifications fired — the whole platform moving on its own. It is the architecture I'm most proud of, and it keeps growing, because I haven't stopped building it.

Here's the part I love. This is the same kind of system the wild Spaniard showed me in that goodbye meeting — the one that flipped my chip, the one I thought I'd lost forever when I said no. I saw that architecture exactly once. Once was enough.

The raise came without the word "promotion" attached — it showed up in the salary and in the remote days instead, which is the version I'll take. Second semester at the USAC: passed everything. From a twice-inherited Mac to an architecture a company runs on — the road so far:

The thirteen-year-old never expected anything big. He just wanted to study something he really liked — and truth be told, he also wanted to learn to make games, but that's not what hooked him. He found that out at fifteen.

When that fifteen-year-old watched a movie about Silicon Valley, he fell in love with technology — with the very concept of the big tech companies — and promised that someday he would be there. He didn't know it, but the thirteen-year-old had dreamed it too; he just hadn't given it a name. When the fifteen-year-old named it, the two of them made the promise at the same time: to work, to study, to understand a new world. To learn how the industry they love most was born, and carry that knowledge wherever they go.

This story proves something important: dreams come true when there are actions behind them. Dreaming is not the important part. The important part is dreaming and knowing you're capable of getting there — wanting it so much you become obsessively ambitious about finding the way.

So: I'm going to make it. For me, for the thirteen-year-old who dreamed bigger than the nineteen-year-old sometimes remembers, and for the fifteen-year-old who saw how an entire world could be born in a small city that is actually a little town, called Silicon Valley. We work on what we love now. We're building things that back then felt so big they didn't even have names — and today they don't just have names: we're building them.