Hey!

I'm Imanol Maiztegui — yeah, tricky name even for Spanish folks — a Lead Engineer at an international telecom company in Europe.

I was born in '91, grew up in an Argentine family that moved to Europe when I was a kid, and that goofy guy in the photo is my buddy Beny.

I don't have a Computer Science degree, I built my skills from scratch.

Seven years ago I opened YouTube and typed “how to code”

After days of watching tutorial after tutorial… I felt completely lost.

The more I learn the more confused I get. I mean, I'm not an engineer. I'm not the best at math. This is meant for a select few. I'm not one of them. Why am I even trying?

Before I knew it, I was procrastinating.

Wasting months doing nothing. Opening a tutorial just to close it and jump into League of Legends (or whatever game I had lying around)

But deep down, something told me to keep going. Becoming a programmer could change my life, and I enjoyed building things.

I couldn't give up

I made it. It wasn't easy—most courses are full of fluff, and cutting through all that noise was tough. But I landed a junior position, worked my way up, and eventually became Lead Engineer at Gamma Telecom LTD.

After seven years in the industry, I felt it was time for something new. The Octagon has been in the back of my mind for years—slowly taking shape, evolving, and growing into something I couldn't ignore anymore. So I quit my job to go all in.

I've always been a curious person, and I love sharing what I learn in the most accessible way possible.

Thanks to fate, I crossed paths with Dave while building The Octagon. Let's just say… he's got one bizarre programming story you've got to hear.

Hi, I'm Dave

If I were a kid in the 80s, I would've blown all my allowance on Space Invaders. But I'm Gen Z ✨

Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated by video games (and animated shows) because they told stories where anything is possible.

As a teen I had no idea what to study, but I knew I liked anything tech-related.

Going for a Computer Science degree felt like the safest move. Plus, I had played around with some programming—typing random commands into the console and feeling like a total hacker.

Spoiler: It was a disaster 😔

I could go on a whole rant about it but I'll keep it short:

We had to take programming exams on paper. No computer, no notes—just pure memorization 💀

That's wild, huh? college in Spain kills your motivation and any drive to actually learn.

In college I took classes on math, physics, outdated processor architecture… but real-world programming—anytime now?

So I had to teach myself.

Every day after class I'd go home, open YouTube and look up tutorials. I even paid for online course subscriptions but I still couldn't connect the dots…

It's like a chef explaining the ingredients but never actually giving you the recipe.

The way they taught was just exhausting 🫠

People kept rambling and half the time I couldn't tell if they were actually saying something useful or just wasting time. They'd jump between examples, tweak code on the fly, and backtrack so much that everything felt messy and hard to follow.

I just couldn't keep up

Weirdly enough the most helpful resource was a book I bought. Reading was much smoother than learning from videos (or even class)

Thanks to the book I picked up some programming basics fast—but I still didn't know how to build anything that showed up on screen (just console prints)

It felt like I'd run a marathon just to move an inch 🤏

And that's when the feeling of being lost came back.

So yeah, during my sophomore year I ended up dropping out of college… and quitting programming too.

I switched over to video editing and marketing—fields I liked as well.

When I met Imanol, I finally closed that unfinished programming business: I'm the lab rat (kinda like a beta tester) for Web Dev Fundamentals.

I've built more projects doing this program than I ever did in three years of college.

Back then finding The Octagon could've kept me programming—it would've been like finding the One Piece.

-D. Varea

PS: A winner is a loser who tried one more time.

These days, with all the AI-generated content floating around, Google’s really focused on figuring out whether a website was made by actual people or just some AI-invented characters someone threw together to make money. So yeah, Google — we’re real humans. You’ve read our story, and yeah, we’ve got some boring LinkedIn profiles where we don’t really post anything… but they exist.

instagram.com/deka.who
linkedin.com/in/varea
linkedin.com/in/imanol-maiztegui