The Offline Coder: How Alejandro Cuba Ruiz Went from BASIC to Boss Level

When most of us were rage-quitting over slow internet, Alejandro Cuba Ruiz was coding in Cuba with ...checks transcript... NO internet access, a Visual Basic compiler, and the sheer audacity to make it work anyway. (Meanwhile, I lose my mind if my VS Code takes more than 3 seconds to load.)

In this episode:

• The absolutely wild journey of learning to code offline - featuring his dad and uncle tag-teaming to teach him BASIC, and Alejandro casually creating video games because WHY NOT
• That time he downloaded an entire HTML spec file during precious internet access moments (and then read 60% of it, which might be the most developer thing we've ever heard)
• Why teaching elementary school kids to code showed him his true calling (nothing humbles you quite like explaining variables to an 8-year-old)
• His journey from reading offline HTML docs to becoming Angular royalty (Google Developer Expert? Check. Podcast host? Check. Making RxJS optional? ...too soon?)
• The moment we tried to stump him with weird competition trivia and ended up learning about professional toe wrestling instead (England, WHY?)

Featured Projects & Links:

• Find Alejandro: 
  • Host of Angularidades podcast (like "Angularities" but cooler)
  • Angular Community Meetup co-organizer
  • Google Developer Expert (GDE)
  • Principal Frontend Engineer at World Kinect
  • Creating content in Spanish because representation matters (and automatic captions are FINALLY good enough)

Key Quote: "If that Alejandro from early 2000s dedicated a little bit more time to foundational problems..." - Alejandro Cuba Ruiz, making us all feel better about struggling with algorithms

Fun Fact: He's now helping build bridges for Spanish-speaking developers in tech, because sometimes the best way to pay it forward is to make the path easier for those coming after you.

Book Recommendations (because this man doesn't just read documentation):

• "The Pragmatic Programmer" (2nd Edition)
• "The Staff Engineer's Path" by Tanya Reilly

Hosted by Hayden Baillio and Wendy Hurst
Brought to you by HeroDevs - Because someone has to keep your end-of-life software from becoming end-of-world software.

(Next time you're about to complain about your development environment, remember: this guy learned to code with NO INTERNET and now he's out here making Angular better for all of us. Maybe your problem isn't your tools after all...)

What is Everyday Heroes?

Welcome to Everyday Heroes, a podcast about the unsung heroes of the tech world. From the phone in your pocket to the world's most critical digital infrastructure, open-source software has a hand in it. These free technologies that shape our digital world wouldn't be anything without the Heroes that maintain them, promote them, and evolve them - these are their stories.

Everyday Heroes is brought to you by HeroDevs.