Patricio Campos

i was always curious. but not the healthy kind, the kind that breaks things to see how they work from the inside. sometimes i fixed them, sometimes i didn't, but i always learned something.

my first interaction with a computer was a family white pc with windows 98. at age 3 i discovered snes9x. i don't remember how those files got there, i just knew how to open the endless list of roms.

at age 9 i was gifted my first android phone, a samsung galaxy i5500. i discovered online that something called cyanogenmod 7.2 existed, which was a modification of the operating system. grave mistake. i started reading tutorials on xda-developers until i bricked it. the punishment was horrible: i could only use it with my mom's supervision for a few minutes a day. a year later the punishment was gone and i had more time, i reattempted the custom rom flash successfully.

at 15 i broke the mbr testing dual boot with linux. with no other pc, i used an otg cable + phone + flash drive to burn a livecd. i restored the boot without losing data and without anyone finding out.

the common thread in all this? i kept getting myself into unnecessary trouble. sometimes i paid the price, sometimes i got away with it, but i always ended up learning more in the process.

technology was my refuge when things were hard. i'd lock myself in my room with consoles and hardware because there i had control.

but i also learned that engineering isn't just code, it's people.

when i first started university, i struggled twice as much as my classmates. i saw how others learned class material faster. i had to study again at home, and sometimes even when i was sick i'd still go to class so i wouldn't miss the material.

today, at 24, i am a computer science engineer. living in scarcity has forced me to find solutions when there's no budget to buy them. i think that's what real engineering is about.

not everything can be solved alone. i look for teams to integrate with, contribute, and grow with others.