About

Hello! I'm Toni Granados, a software engineer and the person behind this blog. I don't post very often, but I like having a place on the internet where I can share things when I feel like it. Since you're here, this is how I got into software engineering and what I've been up to since.

My programming journey kicked off at 14, with a bug in an MMORPG I was playing. A friend of a friend found a glitch that let players claim a quest reward without completing the quest. It could be repeated indefinitely, although the process was pretty convoluted.

At first, my friends and I went through the whole thing manually, but it was tedious and clunky. I knew almost nothing about how software actually worked, but I was sure there had to be a way to automate it. Some googling led me to AutoIt, a scripting language for automating Windows applications. A couple of days later, I had a very scrappy script that worked.

The bug was patched pretty quickly, and those of us who had exploited it were banned. Fair enough. By then, though, I was hooked. I stopped playing the game and started learning as much as I could about software engineering: reading books, watching videos, and building small projects. The possibilities felt endless.

Around the same time, the iPhone was unveiled. It wasn't readily available in my country, but I got to try an iPod Touch, and it blew my mind. Using it felt unlike anything I had experienced before. A few years later, when I started my Software Engineering degree, I got a Mac and began exploring iOS development.

I ended up starting my career in web development, working with Go, React, and Node.js before settling on Ruby on Rails, which is still my favourite way to build web applications. Later, I spent a couple of years working as an iOS developer. I enjoyed it, but eventually found my way back to Rails. Today, I'm an Engineering Team Lead at Alkimii, where I work mostly across Rails and Vue.

Outside work, I'm usually tinkering with a side project or learning something new. I write here when I have something worth sharing. If you'd like to follow along, you can subscribe via RSS.