Hello, my name is Steven Pequeño. My wife Ceara and I live in Texas. I have been occupied with topics in science and technology for most of my life. This post is to introduce myself and this blog in more detail.

About me

I don't want to write a comprehensive autobiography so I'll stick to the story that explains myself from a technical perspective and provides the context for what this blog is and how it came to be.

I have lived in Texas my entire life. I was born in South Texas, lived most of my life in Central Texas and have been in North Texas for the last few years. I love to travel and have visited a lot of places around the US that I adore but Texas has always been home.

Early days

I've always been interested in technology but I consider my first actual start in this field to be when I built my first complicated html/css page by hand when I was 15. I have a tendency to follow my interests wherever that takes me so I have bounced around various topics throughout the years. If there is any big theme about my interests in technology it would be web and internet technology.

I feel lucky to have been born when I was. I was able to experience some of the world as a child before the internet existed. When the internet did arrive I was old enough to appreciate the open, free (as in speech) tenor of the early days. I loved being able to connect with people from around the world and learn about them from the things they'd contributed to the open web. I was inspired to learn how websites worked, and it led me to learn things up and down the stack to this day. I'm still learning about how this all works together.

By the time I was ready to graduate high school I recognized that I had some skill when it came to subjects in math and science but I had interests in the humanities and visual arts as well. I decided that a direct science or engineering path was not right for me and instead went to university and got a degree in psychology with a focus in animal behavior. I mention the focus because that coursework had a lot of overlap with a bachelors in biology so there was still a lot of time spent in science courses.

By the time I was ready to graduate university I recognized that psychology and any type of career I could pursue with that degree was not right for me so after graduating I ended up mostly wasting a lot of time being aimless and dealing (poorly) with various mental health issues for several years.

Throughout the years tech was mostly a hobby. I was pretty good with working with the Windows OS' when I was younger, I re-installed Windows XP so often that I had the product key committed to memory at one point. Eventually I wanted to see what linux was about, I knew it was what most websites ran on and it's what real hackers used. I started with Ubuntu pretty soon after that project started. I remember hating it at first, the file system drove me nuts, I would shake my fist at the sky wondering why I couldn't just find what files were on my C:\ drive.

I kept at linux and got good with using the command line. I learned along the way the core parts of what I needed to know about TCP/IP and how networks worked. I started learning python using the book Think Python. I knew I wanted to turn my hobby/interest in tech into a career but knew I needed to develop my skills further.

I applied to a few places, including Rackspace and was able to get interviews but wasn't able to land meaningful work. At one point I needed some type of job and what was available was a call-center job for Earthlink in San Antonio. This job didn't push me technically, the scope of what we were supposed to support was actually quite small. When I started I remember spending a lot of time helping customers with browser configurations, checking their IPs, taking control over their desktops with their permission to point and click through the problem for them. Most customers loved it, taking over their computer and seeing the mouse move through spooky action at a distance was like magic to them.

Eventually they told me to knock it off and if the hardware was working to end the call. They did like my work and I got to work for their business/enterprise support which paid more but was mind-numbing. In regular support I could talk to people, understand the problem they were describing, do a bit of detective work and hopefully save the day; In enterprise support I was just there to take calls from field techs and fill out forms on their behalf. I didn't stay there long.

A new beginning

I bounced around a few jobs for a while and was still looking to break into IT when I got my big break: Rackspace started a bootcamp style program for linux and network administrators. At the time Rackspace wanted to be able to hire more locally but the tech industry and talent pool in San Antonio at the time was not the best. They created the Open Cloud Academy (OCA) and I was able to join the initial cohort. One interesting fact is that our cohort had been selected and were ready to begin when the Texas Workforce Commission had some issue with the way the OCA was taking payments for the course and delayed the start by 8 weeks or so. At the time I was pretty much out of money and couldn't wait forever for them to open up again. The schedule was set to be like a regular work week, Monday through Friday 9 to 5. If I had to find real work again I wouldn't have been able to do the OCA. It was down to the wire but eventually the OCA decided to side-step the issue and just opened the doors and our cohort wouldn't be charged.

Getting to do the OCA and eventually getting hired at Rackspace is the single most significant event in my life in terms of my career and the life it's afforded me. My program was to train linux administrators, the goal was to become Red Hat Certified Administrators (RHCA) which seemed like such a huge hill to climb. While in the class I realized the time I'd spent with ubuntu transferred well to red hat. There was a lot in the course that I was experienced in but I was introduced to a lot of things related to web hosting that I hadn't done before. Configuring and running apache, configuring red hat to serve apache websites, selinux, etc were all things I was learning in detail for the first time.

I recognized the opportunity I had whether I got hired by Rackspace or not and threw myself into the work. I remember spending hours after class and over the weekend going through the coursework over and over again until it became second nature. I strengthened my bash skills and dug into every man page I could. I dedicated myself fully to learning as much as I could and by the time we were ready to take the RHCA exam I was more than ready to pass. I'm proud of a lot of my time at the OCA but I'm most proud of getting awarded the "Racker to the core" title as voted on by cohort. I spent a lot of time helping and teaching others where I could and I'm glad it resulted in their recognition.

I got hired at Rackspace as a linux administrator for enterprise customers in our datacenters. That role taught me so much about how Rackspace operated. I got familiar with datacenter operations, network security, network storage and a little bit of Rackspace's public cloud. Mostly I got to spend my entire day troubleshooting issues in customers servers, working and learning from other talented and experienced administrators and engineers. I was a linux admin for a couple of years before I got the opportunity to apply for the AWS support team.

AWS

I remember AWS just making so much sense to me. Coming from the dedicated side I knew very well how time-consuming and complex it was to simply get a server online and serving traffic. Many teams of experts were needed across the globe operating hardware and software just to get a customers Dell R720 up and running. AWS just put it all at your fingertips, you could have a private network, virtual machine, and applications installed with a few clicks in the web console and you could automate the whole thing if you wanted to. I remember spending a ton of time on my own learning how to use AWS and preparing to apply to be an aws support engineer.

I got hired onto that team and really excelled. A lot of cloud engineers didn't have a ton of experience with linux or networking or scripting/automation but I had a good foundation for all of those things going into the job. The work was pretty stressful, the support ticket volume and complexity was a lot for a team our size. I learned so much through that job, working through dozens of tickets a day, hoping between customer environments from single server configurations up to multinational corporations multi-account setup. I had the chance to work on just about every service AWS had to offer but our core was the major compute stuff, EC2, ELB, RDS, etc. The key thing for me was that we standardized on CloudFormation.

I personally love CFN and while I understand the hate it gets in various forums around the internet I still think it's great. Considering the complexity of some of the environments I've worked on and built it's amazing to me that CFN is as capable as it is today. Even having tried a lot of other IaC tooling the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is still my go-to and it's pretty much just a wrapper over CloudFormation.

I was in that role for about 5 years before moving on. I've been at my current role as a pre-sales architect for the last few years. This year was my 10th at Rackspace.

Today

I've written more than I expected to about what my technical life has been up until now. As I'm writing this I'm not sure how I feel about it. Maybe to put it another way: I'm not sure what this all is going to mean moving forward. It's January 2026 and we're now several years into the AI era. It's only in the last year or so that models have gotten good enough to write code autonomously. The current hype topic is various ways of getting an agent (or many) to work 24/7 with minimal human intervention. I think a lot of people like me who have dedicated themselves to this field and have relied on our skills for high-paying work and we're wondering where we'll fit as AI develops.

Right now I feel safe because the best AI agents are still really bad at a lot of things and the choices they make can lead to very bad results if there isn't a cohesive vision of what a project does and how it should operate. I'm not sure how long that moat will last. I've been reading research in the AI space and the rate of change and the new techniques we're developing make me think that even long-horizon, highly contextual tasks will become the domain of agents within the next few years. It's not hard for me to see a future where humans writing any code will be about as common as humans hand writing programs in assembly today. Nothing will stop you from doing it and I'm sure some enthusiasts will always do it for the love of the game but big picture: writing code is not going to be considered a human activity.

I'm at an age where I'm reflecting a lot more about where I've been and what's left for me and it's right in the middle of what appears to be a revolution in our relationship to software and artificial intelligence systems. I've found myself feeling liberated in a way. For a long time I've found it hard to be motivated to learn anything. It felt like the tech industry had ossified and there were so many barriers to entry that dedicating myself to learning something new and starting from the bottom of some human defined totem pole was pointless. But if there's no value in a human possessing a rare set of tech skills then right now is the most free I've felt in a long time to just learn the things I actually want to because the only real purpose will be for me. It might pay off in the long run to have deeper knowledge and more skills or it may not if AI and robotics can just do everything better, faster, cheaper, and with no mistakes.

That brings us to this blog. What I think will be more valuable in the future is human produced content. I think humans will always be interested in what other humans can do. And while we see there is value in what AI systems can produce if others are anything like me there is a limit to how much I will ever care about it. I suspect this will always be the case for me until I am convinced of the existence an actual artificial intelligence: something conscious, aware in meaningful ways and intelligent in the ways I consider a human to be, maybe different but equivalent.

I'm going to use this blog to talk about topics in AI and ML, probably a lot of AWS and maybe some programming topics but hopefully I'll also have something outside of tech to talk about that I think other people would find interesting.

A promise

This last section is kind of the heart of this post and a key part of what this blog is. My promise is: The content for this blog will be 100% from me, a human. I want to develop my voice and if anyone is interested in reading this I want them to know and feel that every word they are reading is mine. To me this means this blog will not be strict in style or form, I like the idea of being able to express identity and personality though writing and hopefully I'll be able to do that.