ALEX PEDERSEN

My interest in technology started early on my mother’s work computer. I wanted to play and figure out how it worked; along the way I kept breaking things. They banned me from using it, but when I was home alone I always found a way back in. Eventually they locked it with a password. Without really knowing what I was doing, I opened the case, pulled the motherboard battery, and reset the BIOS. The admin password was gone. It worked, and that was my first click moment.

The second came when I needed space to install a borrowed game and deleted folders Windows needed. The machine would not boot. I walked into a computer shop, innocently asking for advice, and walked out with a Windows CD and formatted the PC myself.

Soon after, my grandmother gave me my first computer of my own, so I would stop messing with my mother’s work machine and the fights would stop. From then on I kept the home PC running, and little by little started doing the same for others: formats, cleanups, and later disk swaps, power supplies, and parts. Before long I was doing home tech support: hardware, malware cleanup, data recovery, reinstalls, and repairs with the client watching.

My first formal job was maintaining more than 20 computers for a local organization. I was also programming and finding clients on my own. I started the Programmer Analyst program at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, moved to La Plata after the first year, and kept building websites and systems for clients until the paid work became my main training.

When I came back I opened a PC sales and repair shop, with websites on the side. In 2015 a consultancy took me to Germany and then Bali for web projects, including sites for professional athletes. When the local shop stopped being viable, I closed it and went full time as a freelancer.

I moved to Spain in 2019. Since then I’ve worked for agencies and international clients on web, mobile, and backend. Around then I got into Ethereum and the EVM, smart contracts, tooling, and a few web3 hackathons.

I still freelance, building websites, mobile apps, and backends for agencies and international clients.