I Never Wanted to Write a Blog
I've never been good at writing. I'm saying that upfront because everything that follows depends on it. For years, people around me suggested I should start a blog. I always said no. I figured I didn't have anything interesting enough to say, and even if I did, I wasn't sure I could put it into words anyone would want to read. So nothing happened. The blog stayed in my head.
What changed? Two things, really. AI, and the fact that I was starting to feel stuck.
Who I Am
My name is Esteban. I live in Cartago, Costa Rica — born and raised here, never left. I'm a husband and a father of two kids, which means most of my non-coding hours are spent trying to be present with them while also figuring out how to get a workout in and not collapse at the end of the day. The balance is hard. Some days I'm better at it than others.
I'm a Ruby on Rails developer, and I've been at it since 2012. I started back in the Rails 2 days and I've grown alongside the framework all the way to Rails 8, which is what I'm building with now. I came up in the software craftsmanship culture, and I'm grateful for that — it gave me a strong foundation and a clear sense of what good code feels like, even when I can't always articulate why.
Career-wise, I've worked in a bunch of different environments. I started at small companies that worked with startups, then moved into mid-sized companies serving more established businesses, and eventually landed at companies with thousands or even millions of users. Each step taught me something different. The technical skills matter, but honestly, the bigger lessons were about how teams actually work — how to talk to product managers, how to negotiate timelines, how to weigh tech debt against new features, how to prioritize bugs. You don't pick that stuff up from a tutorial. You pick it up by being on a project where the planning is bad, the tickets are split wrong, and you end up sprinting to hit a deadline that was never realistic to begin with — and then watching the result land with a thud. That's where the real lessons live.
The Part I Don't Usually Say Out Loud
For the past couple of years, I've been feeling stuck. Same project, same patterns, same tools. The spark to learn just wasn't there the way it used to be. And then there's imposter syndrome. Every developer knows it. It's not loud or dramatic for me — it just sits quietly in the back of my head, always there. I'd listen to podcasts and watch other devs casually talk about stuff I'd never touched, or work alongside people who seemed three steps ahead of me, and I'd start questioning whether I actually belonged in the same room.
I know I'm a decent developer. I've shipped real things, I've solved hard problems, I've grown through every Rails version since 2. But the gap between knowing you're decent and feeling like you're enough is wider than I want to admit. This blog is part of how I'm trying to close it.
Why Now
A few things came together. The best way to actually learn something is to teach it — to put it in words, explain it, defend it. I've been holding onto that idea for a while, and starting this blog is me finally acting on it. Writing about what I'm learning forces me to really understand it, not just nod along while reading.
The other thing is AI. I'm using AI as my writing partner for these posts, which has been a game-changer for me. Writing used to feel like a wall I couldn't get over. Now I can express what I'm thinking and have a tool that helps me shape it into something readable. I'm not going to pretend this is all me. It isn't. This is collaborative writing, and I'd rather be upfront about it than fake it.
Speaking of AI: it's also one of the reasons I feel an urgency to keep learning. Here's the thing that keeps surprising me about it — AI doesn't make the basics less important. It makes them more important. You're not just writing code anymore; you're guiding a system that writes code. And you can only guide something well if you actually understand what it's doing. That's part of why my first posts have been about databases. Fundamentals are the thing that let you catch AI when it's wrong.
What This Blog Is
This blog is going to be a learning journal. I'll be writing about things I'm exploring, things I thought I knew but didn't really, and things that genuinely surprised me along the way. A lot of it will be technical — databases, Rails, and especially AI: what I've been building with it, what's worked, what's blown up in my face, and what I've been learning from using it as part of my daily workflow. Local LLMs have become a real rabbit hole for me lately, and I'm excited to write about that too. Other posts will be more reflective, like this one.
I'm doing this for me first. To learn, to push past feeling stuck, and to build something I can look back on. But if it's useful to anyone else along the way, that's a bonus I'll happily take.
If you're reading this — thanks for being here. More to come.