My name is Pável Varela Rodríguez. Born, raised, and living in Havana, Cuba.
I have interest in a wide range of things: programming and programming languages, minimalism, music, anatomy, psicology, human behavior, photography, FLOSS (free libre open source software).
I'm mainly a self-taught person. When I was 13 years old my father suggested me to include, as part of a project for the cuban equivalent of a Children Science Fair, a little application and a database to support the data of that application. He introduced me to dBase IV (a.k.a FoxPlus), and that was it. From that moment I've been in a constant search for knowledge related to computers and programming.
Minimalism is something I love in programming and software. I'm always amazed by things like Lua, SQLite, Dapper, LINQ, MarkDown, echinus (a tiling windows manager), LinqPad (why not?), LISP (and friends), Aphid (an embedded/standalone programming language for .NET). Those, IMHO, are good examples of minimalist, simple, yet pretty powerfull pieces of software brought to us by really smart people.
Both my parents (and also my entire family) gave me free will and total support in my endless thirst for knowledge. I'm lucky.
The technologies I've played with are, among others: bash, batch, Python, PHP, Lua, D, C#, JavaScript (frontend and backend), CSS, LESS, (X)HTML(5), GTK+, WinForms, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Windows, Linux (my main platform since 2003 aproximately, with ArchLinux as my distro of choice), nginx, Apache, VirtualBox, KVM.
Right now I'm trying to absorb all I can about functional programming and functional concepts and style, so, I'm playing with Lispyscript, most of my C# code is LINQ and more functional styled and less imperative/OOP every day. Also, reading all I can put my hands on about LISPs (Scheme, Racket, Clojure) in order to become familiar with the syntax and ways of doing. For years I've been using constructs like closures in Lua and JavaScript, and I feel comfortable enough writing code in a functional style, but some concepts are not trivial (macros?, monads?), so, study, study, study.
Technology is beautiful and infinitely fun.
I want to apologize in advance for my English level. Spanish is my mother's language and, since English is one more thing I've learned (learning) by myself, I'm not that good at it.