I was born in a modern world. Early toys for kids were dolls, bouncy balls and wood swords to hit eat other with. Growing up in the 2000’s, I had way cooler stuff like radio-controlled cars and baby learning laptops. After these toys got boring after playing with them, the curiosity got to me. How do they work? How does this car move? How does this laptop show me an image of a cow and plays a “mooo” sound when I press the cow labeled button?
Some of my toy’s days were numbered when I figured where my father’s toolbox was kept. Give an idiot a hammer and he’ll smash things with it. Curiosity got to me eventually. How does this car work? I broke the car open to see what magic was inside only to find a bunch of gibberish that just turned out to be cables, a circuit board, a direct current motor and a servo. As I kept breaking toys as time went on, I kept finding similar components assembled in different ways, to do different things. For example, the car had a small circuit board while the laptop had a bigger one with more little parts on top. This savage behavior had a big influence on the choices I made in the future.
When I was in middle school, I wanted to be an airplane pilot just because planes were cool, they had everything, lots of buttons and big engines. My hobbies were basketball, volleyball and Halo: Reach on the Xbox 360. One day, my younger brother, Omar, was playing on the computer a blocky looking game. Turns out it was a site that had a large collection of games, mostly created by users on the platform. This site was Roblox and had everything, games where you can be a pilot, blow things up, and it was just a lot of fun for some young kids. I liked it because I could fly blocky planes that blew up when I crashed. The platform was also social, and you could talk to others in the same game.
After countless hours of fun, I felt like I should try making my own games and Roblox has guides to get the users started on creating them. I read the tutorial, downloaded Roblox Studio, created this thing called a ‘script’ and wrote the following into the first line:
1 print('Hello, world!')
This wrote “Hello, world!” on an output terminal. Little did I know this was a key moment in software development. My first programming language was Lua and shortly after I was reading about if statements, loops and a lot of other things I didn’t understand. I was messing around with concepts like Boolean algebra, and Object-Oriented programming, and I just didn’t know it. Not long after, in the year 2017, I was trying to make my own game on Roblox. My idea was a capture the flag in a randomly generated labyrinth game where two teams must find the enemy base, take their flag and bring it back to base. I invested hours into the development but never got anywhere because I was trying to make a game without a thought-out plan. However, during development, I cemented lots of software development skills I use to this day like proper naming conventions, time complexity and object-oriented programming.
529 local function startGame()
530 local size = 21
531 createMaze(size, size)
532 repeat wait() until mazeFinished
533 getPlayersInTeam()
534 for i = 1, #redTeam do
535 redTeam[i]:LoadCharacter()
536 resetCamera:FireClient(redTeam[i])
538 redTeam[i].CameraMaxZoomDistance = 20
539 giveClass(redTeam[i], "Warrior")
540 end
541 for i = 1, #blueTeam do
542 blueTeam[i]:LoadCharacter()
543 resetCamera:FireClient(blueTeam[i])
544 blueTeam[i].CameraMaxZoomDistance = 20
545 giveClass(blueTeam[i], "Warrior")
546 end
547 checkBase()
548 end
As I spent my time on YouTube looking at how to code and make things, my feed started getting filled with computer science media. Videos about how computers work, people using other programming languages other than Lua, how to make this, how to make that just came one after the other, and I fell into this rabbit hole. I got myself the “C++ for dummies seventh edition” book by Stephen R. Davis and got into coding with C++ because that’s the language for making video games that run straight on the PC.Roblox and my curiosities are what got me into software. I wouldn’t be surprised how many kids got into their respective careers because of Roblox. Maybe life is Roblox after all?
I believe adding in this part is important. It was in Petra Corretjer de O'Neill Highschool that I started making big decisions. The high school had a vocational program to help students, well, find a vocation. I enrolled in the electronics program where lots of resources were made available to me. I had great teachers, power supplies, oscilloscopes, resistors, transistors, breadboards, you name it. I've made light shows out of LEDs and I even put together a Tesla Coil for a class project. It was here that I completely let go of the idea of being a commercial pilot, and saw that I actually was an engineer. I also made my life-long friends here. Shout out to Chris, Ludwing, Dereck, Justin and Kevin!
Growing up in Puerto Rico came with both blessings and challenges. Poverty, austerity, and natural disasters are part of everyday life. People work tirelessly just to make a living and keep their families safe amid ongoing socioeconomic struggles. Over the years, we have endured a government bankruptcy, a rising cost of living paired with stagnant wages, and devastating hurricanes that destroy homes and leave the entire island without essential utility services. Our government often seems more committed to preserving the status quo than creating meaningful change, fostering a political culture shaped by the spoils system, where patronage and party loyalty frequently influence public institutions and employment.
It’s riding bicycles through the neighborhood with your friends, rigging a plastic cup to the tire so it sounded like a motorbike engine. It’s not being allowed into the classroom because your shirt wasn’t tucked in. It’s buying limbers (ice pops) from a jolly lady in the neighborhood, sweet moments that made everyday life feel warm and unforgettable.
Since Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, I eventually had to integrate in order to move forward with my career. This meant speaking more in my second language, English, and adapting to a different cultural and academic environment. Even though we have U.S. citizenship, integration is not always easy or automatic. The experience is similar to that of immigrants from other countries who must adjust, find their place, and navigate a new system while holding onto their identity.
