okJuan

About me in a few seconds

Hi 👋 I’m Juan. I work as a Software Engineer on Microsoft Loop. I love software, writing, music, books, soccer, coffee, & many other things.

About me in a couple minutes

I was born in Mexico City and grew up there playing soccer obsessively. The summer I turned eleven, my family moved to the suburbs of New York and three years later we moved to Vancouver Island. These opportunities in my early life allowed me to develop native proficiency in Spanish & English as well as an intuition for cultural subtleties that differ across North America.

During high school, I learned to play guitar, write songs, and make music using the Maschine MK2 by Native Instruments. My new obsession led me to enroll in Music & Computer Science, an unusual “combined major” at the University of Victoria, with aspirations to learn how to record and produce music. But my plans were soon derailed by the discovery of my new obsession: programming.

My career began with two Software Engineering co-ops at companies with offices in Victoria followed by an internship at Microsoft in the Seattle area during the summer of 2018. I began a fulltime Software Engineering position at Microsoft in September of 2019 and my dissatisfaction with it along with spare time at home during the Covid-19 pandemic spurred me to pursue personal projects in programming related to music and in writing, a latent interest of mine.

I started posting essays on Medium and Substack, and even wrote a short piece as a volunteer for 206 Zulu, the Seattle chapter of the Zulu Union. My writing endeavors have culminated so far in okjuan.me/vbook, which is also a programming project. It’s like a blog, more like a digital garden, but I call it a virtual book. It has many inspirations and it’s still evolving.

Writing as a craft was not the only fruit borne out of my early discontent at Microsoft. After an unhappy first year, I sought out an internal transfer and eventually landed in Excel, where I worked contentedly for a year and a half. Then came the opportunity to join Microsoft Loop, a brand new and exciting Office app. I was intrigued by how Loop was reimagining the collaborative document on principles similar to those of my then-burgeoning idea of a virtual book. I spoke with managers from several teams and eventually got my top choice, working on Loop’s collaborative canvas and text editor. In this new job I finally got that feeling that I could see myself working on this for years. I have been working happily on Microsoft Loop since early 2022.

I’m on an indefinite hiatus from making music, but I still continuously make playlists on Spotify. For what I’m up to in life in general, see /now.