Hey! I just created this blog and I’ll be changing it and modifying the style. In the meantime, you can read this first post!

Hi, my name is Oscar Gonzalez Strozzi, and this is my first entry to my blog! 😛.

I’m 24, and I’m a computer science student at UPM in Madrid in my third/fourth year, and I always wanted to have a personal blog to write all my mental notes and thoughts about programming and share it with whoever is interested.

Why write a blog?

As a programmer, I always come back to some old rusty code and think, DAMN, this is some stinky code!. You can’t even understand it!

In some sense it’s a good sign that you, as a developer, have improved and become a better engineer.

Well, I feel the same way when I revisit some of my old notes. I usually write how I approach a problem, the different solutions that come to my mind & why I decide to go for a specific solution. When I come back and read these notes, I see how (usually) poor my thinking was and the little knowledge I had. I mean, isn’t that the expected result of studying and working hard?

So I jumped to the conclusion that I also wanted to document my evolution of my engineering career and (maybe), in some years, look back and Admire my journey and how far I went (hopefully).

I have a goal in mind; that is, I want to become a compiler engineer. I’m just learning about compilers, and I absolutely love this field (with the little knowledge I have on it). I find the theory behind lexers and parsers very interesting, the way a compiler optimizes code, the infinite possibilities when creating a language, etc.

All that sounds like lots of fun!… And lots of work.

Why Compilers? Just go for the easy money!

I asked some teachers and friends about focusing my career on compilers, and they have told me that it’s a difficult field and kinda hard to find a job. And I guess it’s true, but does it matter? Why would I change my goal just because it’s difficult?

I’d rather work on things I enjoy than work on something I despise (like frontend) and don’t like doing. A lot of People don’t care about what they work on or what path to follow, and I don’t judge them for that, but for me it’s very important to love the work I do and to enjoy the process, because my career will define who I am as a person and as an engineer.. And I want to be able to look back in the future and be proud of where I ended and what I became.

Conclusion

I’m excited to learn about this field, like intermediate representations, optimizers, backends, LLVM, and maybe even creating my own language (though I don’t have a purpose rn to do so, aside from learning purposes), and I wanted to document my journey & my progress. I also want to sometimes write about things I learned at uni or some side-projects, or even thoughts about a particular topic!

Also, I have an awful memory & I always forget everything. So if I need to look for some old knowledge, I can always come to this blog and refresh my memory.

And I need to improve my (formal?) English skills. They are very poor, as you can see.