Think before you build.

I'm Steven Vallejo. Today I define myself, above all, as a philosopher — I study Philosophy at Universidad de Antioquia — but I arrived here by a long road, and it's worth telling.

I grew up in Antioquia, in a neighborhood where nobody expected a kid to become obsessed with a machine. By thirteen I had mastered hardware; by fifteen I was building video games and getting paid for it; at eighteen I signed my first formal contract. While others were deciding what to study, I was solving problems people considered impossible. Not by speed, but by judgment: the difference between doing a lot and deciding well.

Then philosophy arrived and something clicked into place. People assume an engineer and a philosopher are two different people; in me they are the same. Philosophy gave me the method — defining the problem clearly before writing a single line —; computing gave me the depth to take every system all the way through. In 2019 I found myself quite alone and took refuge in the only thing that has never failed me: building. Some of my largest systems came out of those years.

My real obsession is abstraction: looking at ideas, systems and intelligence from the highest point, where you can see patterns that get lost up close. That is what I pursue and what fulfills me: taking a problem others consider impossible and leaving it solved, running.

Abstracción is my public notebook: philosophy applied to the machine. Here I look at technology from above — without unnecessary jargon and without losing rigor — to better understand how we think when we build intelligence.