What I Am When I Close the Laptop

Most of what shows up about me online has to do with code: architectures, migrations, systems that can't afford to fail. But that's only part of the day, and I wanted to use this space to tell the rest of it.

I'm 45 years old and I'm a dad to a four-and-a-half-year-old boy. I live in Escazú, San José, though my roots are further south: my parents, Rosa Mesén Rodríguez and Manuel Herrera Jiménez, still live in Pérez Zeledón, the place I grew up in before moving to the capital.

I'm the oldest of three brothers, and one of the things I'm proudest of is what each of them became. Pablo Alejandro is a civil engineer; Allan Gabriel is a doctor, a kidney specialist. Each one ended up building or caring for something different — literally, in Pablo's case — and somehow I ended up doing my own version of that with systems instead of structures or patients.

Being the oldest also means I was the first to leave Pérez Zeledón, the first to move out on my own, the first at a lot of things my brothers later lived through in their own way. Being the oldest sibling is a strange, good place to be: you clear a path without fully knowing it, and years later you realize it mattered.

Most of my days now revolve around my son — his four and a half years are that stage where everything is a question, everything is discovery, and as a dad you rediscover the world through his eyes. It's, without comparison, the most important project I have in progress, and the one that looks the least like anything I've ever built on a laptop.