Some engineers need a product spec, a tech lead, and three standups a week to ship a feature.I'm not that engineer.

This is how it happened.

It was video day in school. Everybody seated. We had that classic rolling TV cart with the VCR and a VHS tape playing... and out of nowhere:

Boom! The TV went pitch black.

The teacher had no clue what was going on, so she hit the red power button again and everything came back on. A minute later, it shut off again, this time the VCR. By the third time the TV crashed, that was the end of the show: no more educational video.

'Damn piece of junk', she muttered under her breath in pure frustration... or so she thought, because the whole class heard it.

And yet, nobody in class had seen me. But my friend Frank...

...he instantly knew it was me.

He knew me well and I was 16 and had a jailbroken Symbian Nokia 3650 loaded with a universal remote app.

It was 2003 and however stupid my videos were at the time, I was always short of space, so I was doing market research surveys for small amounts of money. Every cent, every euro, going toward storage for that little machine of joy.

Within days, I had turned my phone into a jukebox. Full mp3 playback.

No one around me had that. A few people in my neighborhood had phones by then, but I was the only one with a hacked operating system running music on hardware that wasn't built for it.

So people would see it and ask: "How did you do that?"

But I didn't have a clean answer. Just saw something I wanted, found the path, and kept going until it worked.

Same thing when I was dismantling old PCs my uncle passed along before throwing them out — taking the working parts, figuring out what fit with what, building machines from the scraps.

Or learning English not from a class (I hated it), but from tech forums, because that was the only way to get to the information I needed.

Of course we all learn fast when we have a reason.

I loved that stuff. I spent hours locked in my room, constantly glued to that box filled with text, one hour after another until I got what I wanted. Installing an OS, pranking a friend, bypassing restrictions...

So much so that I ended up becoming the family's go-to tech guy. Whenever someone didn't know how to use something on their phone, they called me.

I once went phone shopping with my mother (she asked) and told the saleswoman the phone had to have WAP 2.0,—1.0 wasn't gonna cut it—and at least 65,536 colors, because 4,096 was basically pre-historic.

And honestly, it even crossed my mind that I could do her job 10 times better than she could. But of course, I was into the technology itself; retail, not so much.

Back then, naturally, people kept asking me: 'What are you gonna study?'

And ever since I was a little kid, working in tech had always been my dream. But because I couldn't see the path forward, I thought it'd be impossible for me to ever get there.

Because I'd fallen into the same bullshit trap as so many others: believing that to be a programmer, you have to be some kind of genius or a total math whiz.

Yes, people born with a kind of brain I thought I didn't have.

Turns out...

By all observable evidence, I was already doing what programmers do.

Still, I didn't see it that way, at all.

It only took a bad experience with a math teacher in secondary school to convince me I wasn't that kind of person and I didn't have this kind of brain. So I filed it under "not for me" and moved on.

That belief held for a long time.

And I ended up in hospitality. Not by accident — I was good at it. Eleven years.

Bar operations at Grupo Dani García, Platea Madrid — Michelin-star level, where there's no version of "close enough." Every service, every day, at the highest standard without exception.

And I loved that part cause it felt familiar.

The same obsessive pattern: understand the system, find where it breaks, fix it before it breaks.

Different domain. Same instinct.

Alongside it, I built a network of affiliate and SEO sites that actually made money. Not hobby projects — systems I researched, structured, and ran like a business. I had to learn search mechanics, conversion logic, content strategy. From scratch.

Because I wanted to, and because I had discovered a fun problem I wanted to solve.

Then DeFi, because finance became the next hard thing. Three years reading whitepapers, not summaries. Starting with Bitcoin, understanding the mechanics, not just the headlines.

But at some point the story changed...

...and I came across David Deutsch's argument:

All problems are soluble given the right knowledge.

And it's an uncomfortable idea because it removes excuses.

If a problem persists unsolved, it's a knowledge deficit — find the knowledge, solve the problem.

So I ran that against the belief I'd been carrying since I can remember:

I'm not made for programming.

And I'm happy I did, because it didn't survive the contact with the principle.

Because the kid who modded phone operating systems at sixteen, who built PCs from salvage, who learned English from documentation because he had no other path — that kid had been doing this the entire time.

The only thing missing was the belief that he could...

...and that was just a knowledge problem too.

So I finally learned to code.

And I did it the same way I'd learned everything else: identify the problem, find the knowledge, go until it works.

DeFiScout exists because I read the Uniswap V3 whitepaper before touching the SDK. That's not a flex — it's just the only way I know how to work.

SipMatch exists because I had eleven years of bar expertise and wanted to see what a recommendation engine built from actual domain knowledge looked like, not from a tutorial.

And despite thanks to all those mistakes, here I am.