How did you end up in your current role?

It all started when I was 15 that I started being a "Sysadmin" for a rather small organization of people (We were only two 😅), we kept going for at least a whole year were I was in charge of Development support for the people who wanted to host their stuff but didn't know much about coding, keeping our infrastructure up and running and automatizing pretty much everything so I could stop doing repetitive work day after day.

I had to drop it for college, fast forward two years, had to drop college because of the entire Venezuelan situation.

Started doing freelancing, managed to save little money here and there while I was basically the pillar of my entire house.

Stuff went down in Venezuela and I had to leave (like pretty much every young citizen who wanted to remain mentally stable and without an empty tummy)

Started as a Full Stack Developer (Mostly NodeJS and Golang) in a big Portuguese company for a couple years, got kicked due to a shady budget cutout, moved to another big brand here in Spain and here I am, leading some of the cloud architecture for projects based on Document Management while still, automating stuff that consumes time with Go :).

I'm 26, born on April 21st and that's pretty much it.

I took an entrepreneurial path which means no specialization, lots of generalization, lots of hectic self-learning.

So I've slightly different roles, and evolving capacities to get stuff done, but I've basically had the title of "technical founder" the whole time.

I dropped out of college after one semester; I was living in Ecuador at the time. I then moved back to the US and got a job as a repair tech at an Apple Store. I soon got tired of being treated like crap by the customers so I quit and landed a help desk role. I started to teach myself how to code and got an AWS certification, after a year and a half I landed my current job as a Cloud engineer, I've been in this role for almost two years now.

I'm a product of being in the right place at the right time! I'm a bootcamp grad, and the bootcamp I attended sets up opportunities for graduates to present their final projects to companies. One of those presentations turned into a "Let's see how you work with the team." From there, I did those trial-run days. Those around me wanted me to keep looking.

I ignored them and now I love my job.

At the end of my college program we had a Capstone project that was meant to showcase everything we learned during our time there. Companies from the area came to see what we worked on and I was offered a job that same day as a Jr Software Developer. After 3 years there I wasn't feeling like it was good for my future so I moved on to become a Problem Analyst. I was only there for 6 months before realizing it wasn't a good fit for me. Luckily for me a previous company I had interviewed with was sending me offers to join there team so I did, landing me in my current position of Cloud Developer.

This is an interesting story. I was blogging for almost a year and made one open-source contribution.

Here is how I did it?
youtube.com/watch?v=1EvaxRIBU-8

Fast forward, I was casually looking for a job which was more challenging; I found this cool research team working on the life sciences domain.

I walked into their lab one day and showed my pandas contribution code and they showed me some of their work, that was the interview

2 days later I had my offer at hand.

I've been programming since high school but actually got my Bachelors in Materials Engineering. After discovering that I am not a good fit for the rigid structure of a chem lab (though chemistry is awesome), I fell back to my computer roots and worked as an IT tech at the help desk at my college. After graduation I had some false starts, getting laid off from my jobs as a technical project manager at a tech startup and then again as an IT Tech at an MSP. Fortunately, I applied for and got a contract help desk position at my current company. That turned into a senior IT tech full time role and then into a promotion to my current role as an IT Engineer.

I'm very excited that I now have time to develop and that I'm highly encouraged to. The other engineers on my team do a lot of scripting, but I've been able to branch out into actually applications. I just finished my first C# program for our Office Management team to track meeting room usage using data from Microsoft Graph. Those stats are something they've been asking about for years and it's really great to be able to finally give them something.

I was stuck in a biz ops role in sales/support after failing as a biz project manager. I made a decision to get into programming, and applied to both an internal tech training program and an external boot camp program. My company accepted me for their new program, and I was the third person to be able to go through it (company of like 5k+). The program entailed sending me to a boot camp for a few classes and then placing me on a team with mentorship right after for further learning.

I'm continuing to learn while on the job, whether it's dealing with legacy code or building a new service from scratch. However, I've been spending a lot of my time helping mentor other folks who want to get into programming, so they can make the same jump I did (but maybe make it a little easier for them).

At the age of 16 when students in Czechia take dance classes, I fell in love with dancing and joined a dance team. Then I started dancing with a girl who is now my girlfriend and whose friend's dance partner works in IT. He told me his comany was hiring an intern for GUI testing with Selenium. I got hired and after one year I moved to a different team of the company and now I am a Java developer. Throughout the time I have come to realize how many people who dance also work in IT.

I become a full-time Developer Advocate for almost half a year now. Loving it. Before the transition, I was a data scientist but always love doing (and spending "too much" time on) community work (speaking at conferences, contribute to open-source, organise events). So after reaching out to a few DevRel friends and getting some tips, I am lucky to find a job ad from a mailing list and get my dream role.