My Childhood

When I was a child, I liked to justify my decisions and needs based on the logic of what was “right” for a child. I also had a large number of toys, with which my sister and I created many stories weaving together various themes. I was always playing, striving to prepare the next plot, though from time to time I would make origami or draw paper figures of different characters.

My first challenge was keeping my ideas to myself, since my father and my sister liked to tease me about girls. So I had to keep my worlds separate and was forced to resolve everything on my own.

That was until there were several fights between my parents, even reaching court, and my father stopped living with us. My way of coping with those changes was telling myself that, as a child, it was my place to play.

I used to hang out on the computer playing browser games like Friv, since I wasn’t allowed to download anything on the laptop; the only exception was Minecraft, which marked the start of my habit of downloading and buying games. I also watched videos on YouTube of people playing in certain ways, to experience the titles or discover new scenarios. What caught my attention the most were the RPGs: they let me progress by managing resources, and there I learned, in a way, to wait in order to get the best reward.

My Little Bubble

Midway through the following year, my father took us out of the house. My sister and I went to live with one of his aunts in a nearby district, but since he worked in several places, we didn’t live with him. Something we used to do was go out for walks downtown; being close to the coast, I started wearing my jacket with the sleeves rolled up so I wouldn’t feel the cold breeze. Once the year was over, we moved again—this time to an aunt’s place in the capital, where there were also several uncles I didn’t know.

Although I changed schools because of my parents’ arguments, I had experienced school changes much earlier because I liked to play even during class. Later on, my teachers told me that, since I grasped things faster than other kids, playing was my way of not getting bored.

They restricted my tablet use, so I created my own entertainment: paper figures, a pen, and adhesive tape—inspired by the ideas of Dragon Ball and some schoolmates. That’s where I created my alias “Fuis18”, from fusing the names “Luis” and “Fuego” (Fu + is).

Mother’s Day brought my second challenge: maintaining my identity. I am the son of two people, and just because I was being taken in by another family didn’t mean I had to pretend or adapt to blend in. At the end of the year, on a graduation trip, they took us to a two-day camp that my sister and my father attended, so I began planning how to split my time between my nuclear family and my classmates.

Becoming a Teenager

The following year we went back to live at my father’s aunt’s house. It was a small city, so making friends was easier; in fact, I’m still in touch with one of them. During that time I developed the idea that I was no good at history, because they demanded memorizing dates and names by writing in our notebooks from dictation, leaving very little room for the context of each character and being overly restrictive instead of relating it to the key events that allowed the world to evolve.

Between being a man and remaining a child, I ran into two situations: the first happened while arguing with the daughter of my father’s aunt’s son, who was crying; with certain questions I managed to solve the problem. The second situation involved my father’s aunt’s husband: when his phone rang, he asked, “Now why would they be calling me?”, to which his wife replied, “Well, they’ll want something; it won’t be to say hi.” At that moment I told myself that I would call just to say hi—a habit that over time would lead to extremes.

Midway through the year, two things happened: first, on a field trip I was given a small notebook and a booklet, where I began writing down the names of all the songs I liked, since I had discovered a great number the previous year; with the idea of remembering them in the future, I carried it everywhere. Since there wasn’t internet, in the few available moments I had to download music for the “dark days”.

Finally, due to social pressure, I began planning how to approach a female classmate for sentimental reasons; thanks to some advice, I started writing her a letter about life and curiosities that little by little turned into life advice.

Stability?

When I finished school, my father came to take us to live with him, since he had gotten a more stable job. As if I could sense what was coming, I asked my aunt to give me back my paper dolls, which she had taken away from me.

Upon arriving at the new place, my father taught us to scrutinize the Bible and to think, since he said that developing critical thinking is better than academic knowledge. My desire to be healthy also grew, since it was logically correct. The last challenge was money: indirectly, I began to prefer saving and taking advantage of economies of scale, because future enjoyment was going to be more profitable, just like in video games, but applied to real life.

Once I started at the new school, I applied the tactic of being a quiet person to then slowly open up; I already knew the formula. But this time the level went up: the school was also a church and we lived across the street, renting an apartment. Also, my father was friends with the teachers, and the pastor had been one of his disciples in the past, since my father had led the same organization for a long time before leaving it due to family issues. That made it much harder to separate my worlds.

We also began to walk around downtown and, since it looked weird to always go out wearing a jacket, they suggested using cotton shirts to cut the breeze without dying of heat in the attempt—something that nowadays is part of my identity and allows me to be versatile in multiple situations.

I made many friends and it was the first time I dared to have social media—although I had owned a phone before, I had never felt the need—. I remember that one of the first things I did was share awareness videos about climate change, because it was a correct and good topic, where every small step matters.

As a teenager I also wanted to get close to people in a sentimental way, so I chose to study people using my notebook to design plans, movements, and schedules. I ended up delving deep into the church and into pop culture. Eager to help a classmate with computing—who was being taught HTML in Notepad—I started creating my first web pages, guided by some blog or free course that gave me the syntax. My idea was to recreate the internet by making my own web pages.

Let’s keep the streak going!

I managed to enroll for the following year and I was very excited because I would finally get to keep seeing them, but the pandemic arrived. Although I didn’t move, I stopped seeing them; my spirits dropped and I started looking for something to entertain myself with. Although I tried to keep in touch through social media, since I didn’t have stable internet, I went back to looking for courses for the lean days. That’s when the content creator @soydalto published videos on HTML and CSS, which I worked through little by little.

I also awakened a detective skill: social media was a gold mine for getting to know people, as long as you knew how to look everywhere. Though socially it may be seen as something obsessive, in tech matters it is a great booster.

It didn’t last long, because halfway through the year we moved. I was transferred to a national school and everything became virtual. This new place was in another province, at the house of some friends of my father’s. I started drawing mathematical graphs like prime numbers or the golden ratio. When there was internet, I played Roblox and met people online; the idea was to share experiences. It became a big addiction, but I understood that you can force your mind to keep going in the game or decide to be bored.

Coming back

At the beginning of the following year we returned to the capital to spend it with some relatives, but it turned out that one of them had gotten sick with COVID-19. My father also got infected and passed away ten days before my birthday.

At first I didn’t understand what was happening; after having had to say goodbye to so many people, my mind didn’t process the death as such, but as another move, so I kept going in my world—although the following year all that accumulation of feelings overflowed.

Once the news spread, my mother came to pick us up and I moved again—this time to my childhood city. However, having been away from my parents for so long, I lost the feeling of family; instead, I gained great emotional independence, which, of course, would take its toll later on.

Since virtual classes continued, they bought me a mobile phone and I discovered Guardian Tales thanks to my sister sharing the game with me, where I met Delasama. I also started going to the church where I had grown up, recognizing several faces and asking about what my father had been like.

At the end of the year they bought me my computer and, with the idea of keeping making web pages—since there was no Wi-Fi again—I took advantage of the fact that the YouTuber @soydalto uploaded several-hour JavaScript courses. There I discovered the taste for automating and, above all, for using logic, which for a good while became a pillar of my identity: if someone else could reach the solution, why couldn’t I with my own abilities?

Two other important things also happened:

  1. I went to a church camp where I met a girl who wanted to help others regardless of the system or money; that opened my mind and I was surprised to find people like that. We kept talking on social media, but in the end communication was cut off.
  2. I met a Salesian father who, toward the end of the year, became a great friend. With him I learned philosophy formally and he helped me solve the problem of death: the idea is that, even if there had been resentments, when you love a person you can remember them through their best moments.

Time to Step Up

I finished my school years constantly changing environments. That made me a computing enthusiast and also made my principles evolve, feeling that it was time to develop them in depth.

My intention was to visit that last girl, so I chose to become a youth leader at church; the Salesian father even liked my ideas. However, economic and responsibility problems arose.

When I started working at a call center for telecom services to pay for my Software Engineering degree, some coworkers invited me to join a rotating savings fund (pandero). Meanwhile, I started studying React and its various libraries thanks to the YouTuber @fazt. My goal was to save money to travel the following year, but there were many coordination and trust problems. And although I met many people—and also had to say goodbye to others—, my mind began to perfect a facet to “robotize” myself, since I had to serve multiple people, usually angry, in little time. Many times the solution didn’t depend on me, but I had to remember to sell them something; this forced my brain to its limit, breaking me over two years while I tried to pass courses, study libraries, do projects for my ministry, and manage a very changing social life at work.

The laptop they had bought me had only 4 GB of RAM, so I started to discover the limits of my system. When trying to have the backend (NestJS), the frontend (NextJS), and the database (PostgreSQL), everything became very slow, so I chose to set up a server on Linux where I could use Docker and distribute the load between my father’s computer and mine; that’s why I chose Arch Linux, since it was as light as possible and excellent for a low-resource computer.

When that stage at the call center came to an end, I had time to dedicate myself to perfecting my Arch Linux, and that’s how I discovered Rust for its performance and later the free software ecosystem. At the peak of a small need to help a café, I made my first app with Tauri, combining my web and Rust knowledge, and began to experience its great potential.

The Climax

I tried to see that girl again, following some leads, making all the preparations to leave my hometown behind and start with the idea of a new system. I traveled to my aunt’s place and, with little money, managed to find her, but things didn’t go well. Since my mother wanted me to come back, I returned with the idea of having to build it all by myself.

I decided to spend a year not being socially active and to focus completely, but my uncle—who had been with us since my childhood—died. My whole family came to my hometown; however, my mind, having accumulated sadness and shut itself away, did not win their favor, since I showed neither tears nor evident sadness before the loss.

Finally

With more time to perfect my ideas, I started watching videos from the YouTuber @midudev, expanding my ecosystem and reinforcing my principles, besides starting to understand myself better. Mid-year I had to repair my fan, since compiling with Tauri demanded too much from the machine; because of that, I made the preparations to install Arch Linux on my main computer and discovered the PollyMC-Continued project, trying to be more active and share my knowledge from the perspective of performance and modernity.