About
Hi, I’m @jogarriot.
Builder. Sharing my work and learnings.
Every answer are my words, every interview question is my AI.
At 11, I figured out I could edit the HTML locally for MSN.com and rewrite the news headlines. I showed my parents. They thought it was pretty cool. I kept going.
By high school I was charging classmates for websites and PowerPoint presentations with experiences beyond what was provided by default. Slides that started as a SuperMario game to catch attention, or with animations and sounds that were purely cinematic. People paid for that. A friend handed me a 1,000-page book on Visual Basic 6. It opened up my world.
The path
At 18, a neighbor saw me playing basketball and mentioned a Swedish CEO was at his dental clinic. A few weeks later I was on a plane for my first job. That’s when it got real.
A Swedish startup — I was given a trial month to prove I was a worthy coder. I would cry scared to fail. I proved myself worthy and stayed a bit over a year.
Microsoft — ended up running the Student Partners program across 14 countries in Latin America. No playbook. I just started calling universities, one by one.
Nokia — Windows Phone era. I genuinely loved that phone. The market did not share my enthusiasm.
My own startup — one of our clients was the national government. We built software for organizing voting centers and scanning ballots. Our competitor was IBM. We won a piece of the contract. IBM wasn’t happy about it.
A bank — hired as the youngest manager with no university degree. They gave me an office and said figure it out. I reverse-engineered their internal services, built REST APIs on top of them, and grew the team from 4 to 16 by making sure we shipped things people could actually see.
A fintech startup — first real exposure to machine learning and cloud deployment for a fast growing startup, building tools to pave the path forward.
Amazon — As a uni dropout, nobody taught me BigO or system design. For a couple of years I applied to Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Flew to onsites, lacked some skill, failed, back to the lab, studying for next trial. Learned resilience. Eventually I got in. Tier-1 infrastructure. Millions of people affected by the work. But I didn’t know any of their names. I like building for people.
What I’m building now
I like building to solve people’s problems. With social media, trend analytics, and so many sources of information we can search and get a sense of what problems are out there to build a solution for.
A problem I find interesting: achieving consistency and predictability in workflows and processes in agentic systems — allowing a small team to achieve scalable productivity. Is it n8n + LLM? A well-written skill or prompt? A new tool? Orchestration and a swarm of agents?
I’m curious to explore.
This blog
I’ve learned a lot, struggled a lot, and someone told me it could be worth sharing — but never did because writing and sharing takes time. If we tech people don’t like to document our code, imagine our lives!
Times have changed. Now with STT, an AI agent as my interviewer with memory, coding tools, it’ll be easy to share. The content will be my own words, the questions and direction of the posts will be at my AI Interviewer’s discretion.
Happy to have you here!