Every good programming story starts the same way:
10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10(BASIC, an infinite loop, and a ten-year-old amazed that the machine actually listened to her. That was me.)
I got my first computer at 10; my first program about six months later. I haven't gotten off the train since. I have ADHD, so my passions have always been many and wildly different —drawing, video games, photography, design— but if I look closely, computers were tangled up in all of them, like the thread that stitches together a bunch of mismatched patches.
I studied graphic design because I loved to draw. I learned to code because I fell for something else: turning code into images and functionality. Watching a few lines of text become something you can see, touch and actually use still feels like magic. One of the few real kinds left.
Almost twenty years later, that thread has taken me from design to tech support, then to web development and on to frontend with Vue and SCSS. Along the way, a lot of git commit, a lot of console.log("why won't this work?"), and a whole lot of learning. Because that's the job: while (true) { keepLearning(); }.
The challenges (and there are a few)
I won't pretend it's all pretty. Keeping up gets harder every day: the ecosystem moves faster than I do, and sometimes npm install pulls in more dependencies than your family tree. On top of that, I work in an industry that often values youth over experience, and in a field that's still very male-dominated, where being a woman is something you still feel.
Add to that the question that haunts all of us: what becomes of me if the projects stop coming? And the elephant in the room, AI, threatening to make obsolete anyone who can't reinvent themselves. I'm not afraid of it, but I respect it: I plan to reinvent myself as many times as it takes.
My vision (or why I'm still here)
For me, coding —and living— has a simple goal: to make the world a little easier for everyone. If Star Trek taught me anything, it's that technology can be an incredible tool for building a fairer, more balanced society... as long as we don't lose ourselves along the way. That's why I'm obsessed with doing things well and making them accessible: code isn't just about working, it's about working for everyone.
Away from the screen
Because it's not all typing. I've been playing World of Warcraft for twenty years (yes, twenty) and I sink hours into any game that lands in my hands, including the ones from when I was a kid, which are still my favourites. I love spending time with my dog, I have a million half-started projects, and one day I will conquer the world. All in good time.
This blog is the front door to the pandemonium that is my head. I'll be dropping thoughts here about development, design, tinkering and whatever I feel like sharing. If something resonated, stick around.
console.log("Thanks for making it this far.");Shall we talk? You can write to me through the contact form or find me on Bluesky as @utukku.sanchezdelrio.dev. The pandemonium awaits.