About me
Early Days
I'm Xavi, a Software Engineer based in Barcelona.
I was born in 1991 in Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. My life was pretty normal. I was a happy kid, I studied in public schools, and we moved a couple of times to different towns.
Since I lived in a village, I used to play outside with friends, ride my bike, read Harry Potter books, play Pokemon on my Game Boy, and eat fruit directly from the trees.
Internet and Graphic Design (2005)
At 14 or so, during those countless nights spent online sending nudges to friends on MSN Messenger, downloading media with eMule, burning CDs with Nero, and chatting with strangers on Terra Chat, I started getting more curious about computers.
Who remembers those days at cybercafes, playing Counter-Strike 1.6 via LAN with friends and paying for computer access by the minute?
I discovered Adobe Photoshop, and my interest in graphic design was born. I spent many hours learning and practicing until I gained some basic ability and taste.
High School Dropout (2008)
At 17, before university, I dropped out. I had always enjoyed school and learning, and I even found it easy most of the time, but by then I felt lost and lacked interest and motivation.
For more than two years, I worked as a waiter at a local pizzeria, where I felt at home. On the day I turned 19, I left my parents' home and headed to Barcelona without much money in the bank, but with plenty of hope.
There, I found a job as a waiter in the city center, next to the cathedral. Most customers were tourists, and my English was very basic. That was the first time I felt real pressure at work, very different from the cozy pizzeria back home.
That was a temporary job, so I had to find another one. This time, I ended up in Sarrià in a wealthy neighborhood and a more refined restaurant. I got to serve quite successful people, and I even served breakfast in a private space to Pep Guardiola, the renowned football coach of FC Barcelona and Manchester City.
During all this time working as a waiter, the days were long, and my mind was constantly wandering. I was hoping for a more exciting future.
The Social Network (2012)
I was living in a flat that I shared with one of my best friends, one of those real friends you can count on the fingers of one hand. He had also dropped out before university and was in a similar situation. One night, we watched The Social Network, the movie about Facebook, and it sparked a tremendous curiosity in us about the startup world.
After a few days, and without any prior knowledge or experience in software or business, we decided to build "a website". It would be a nightlife social network. We called it TuPlanC, "Your Plan C". We felt incredibly motivated.
TuPlanC (2012-2014)
We defined the product together, and I was in charge of the design. My co-founder was more in charge of the marketing side, although we both played all roles (product, sales, business, etc). We brought in a developer to build the first version while we worked on marketing and growth, together with two other colleagues who joined us.
We locked ourselves in for months, working day and night, weekends and holidays, learning as we went. It was intense and fun.
During that time, I started learning to code, mostly front-end development with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so I could contribute to the product. Seeing that I could bring ideas to life was incredibly exciting.
We launched, got some users, got some press, and raised a small amount of investment, but in the end we couldn't make it work. After almost two years of grinding, we had to shut down the project.
Ignoring the outcome revenue-wise, that experience changed my life. It opened my eyes to a new world of possibilities and made me realize that I wanted to be part of the tech industry.
Back Home (2014-2015)
I ran out of savings, so I had to move back to Lleida, my hometown, and live with my parents. I tried to find a job as a front-end developer, but there weren't many opportunities there. Talk about defeat.
I still had to work and earn money, so I ended up selling energy contracts door to door. It was tough, and it even felt like I was scamming people.
In the meantime, I kept building projects for fun and learning. That helped me sharpen my front-end development skills.
Returning to Barcelona (2015)
One day, I got a call from my friend and co-founder from TuPlanC. He told me that one of TuPlanC's advisors, with whom we had a good relationship, had received a request from an acquaintance looking for people to build a small product team.
Of course we accepted immediately. That was the opportunity I was waiting for.
The plan was to work for an entrepreneur who had had successful exits back in the day. He helped us move to Barcelona again, financially and logistically.
For a few months, we built projects he envisioned. Using mostly PHP and MySQL, that marked my introduction to back-end development.
Finally, he hired us full time to build a bigger project that he had also been hired for. That was my first real job as a front-end developer.
Evolution as a Software Engineer (2015-present)
AtlasLab
After we relocated to Barcelona and worked on some experiment projects for the guy that hired me and my co-founder and helped us relocate, he got a business opportunity of building a betting platform in LATAM trying to replicate the success he had in the past in a similar operation in Spain.
There I consolidated my front-end skills and met more techie people which some of them we still remain in touch.
WeGoBcn
After working in AtlasLab for some months, I felt like it wasn't my place anymore. We got a combined offer, me, my co-founder, and a couple of developers who became friends, to join an early startup that wanted to revolutionize the way people organized trips by building an intelligent planner with voice recognition.
The project was led by non-technical first-time founders, and it took too much time, and too many product leadership changes, to ship something. Eventually, it went bankrupt.
Still, I improved my front-end skills and even contributed to the back-end.
Last but not least, there I met the person who is now my wife and the mother of my daughter, Blau. Fun fact: we kept our relationship secret for a long time because we were working together and didn't want it to affect our professional careers.
UserZoom / UserTesting
When I found the UserTesting job posting, I didn't know much about the company. But since my career in tech had started with UI design and front-end development, I liked the market they were in, UX research, and saw that they had just raised $30M in funding, so I decided to bet on them.
And what a great decision that was. At the beginning, it was a bit frightening, like any first day at a new job. On top of that, I had to work in English because I had coworkers in the US.
Technologically, it was the most complex company I had worked for. I had to manage multiple repositories, start working with microservices, and learn how larger engineering organizations operate.
All these challenges, and being surrounded by passionate people, made me grow a lot as a Software Engineer over the nine years I've been working there, and counting.
Computer Science (2018-2026)
After a couple of years working at UserTesting, I felt challenged and decided to formalize my knowledge. I enrolled in the Computer Science degree at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), a 100% online university.
I had always liked learning by myself, so the fact that it was online suited me perfectly. I could keep working full time while studying nights and weekends.
No one ever asked me for a degree to work as a developer, but I wanted a more solid foundation. I wanted to understand Computer Science concepts, algorithms, data structures, and other fundamentals that, as a self-taught developer, I had maybe never dived deep enough into.
Making the decision wasn't enough to enroll, because I hadn't passed the entry exam back in the day. So I had to study for months in order to pass it. Catching up on math and other subjects after so many years was humbling. It was tough, but I went through it successfully.
At the time of writing, in July 2026, I have just completed my Computer Science degree. After eight years of intense nights and weekends spent studying, this feels like one of the most rewarding achievements of my life.
Studying Computer Science has changed me both professionally and personally. In many ways, it rewired how I think. I now feel I have a broader view of the discipline, and I'm better able to understand problems, reason about trade-offs, and architect solutions.
Indiehacking (2024-present)
Around 2024, something started changing in the way I approached side projects.
For many years, I built things mainly to learn. A project was a way to practice a new technology, improve my craft, or prove to myself that I could build something. That was valuable, and it helped me grow a lot technically, but it also meant that many projects stayed private, unfinished, or disconnected from real users.
Then I became more interested in indiehacking and solopreneurship. I started seeing side projects not only as technical exercises, but as small bets: opportunities to understand a problem, ship a solution, talk about it publicly, and maybe turn it into something useful for other people.
That also changed my relationship with creating content. I started using Twitter/X and short-form writing as a way to think out loud, share what I was building, and connect with people with similar interests. Instead of waiting until everything felt polished, I became more comfortable sharing raw thoughts, lessons, and work in progress.
This phase has pushed me to learn skills that are easy to ignore as an engineer: positioning, copywriting, distribution, pricing, customer conversations, and consistency. I still care deeply about technical quality, but I no longer see the goal as becoming the most technical engineer in the room. I want to build useful products, enjoy the process, and create things that can stand on their own.
You can check out some of my projects.