I was born in Colombia, raised in the Canary Islands, formed first in mixed martial arts and then in code. This is the long version.
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ORIGIN
I was born in the eje cafetero of Colombia. My mother brought us to Spain when I was fifteen days old. We landed first in a small town in Valladolid, in what people call 'la España vaciada,' depopulated rural Spain. Someone told her the Canary Islands had better weather and more room to build a life, so we moved. I grew up in Canarias. It is where I went to school, where I made my first friends, where I started training, and where I met Nami, who has been my life partner. Everything else in this page is downstream of what my mother did in those first years.
- 7c4b9d32010 → 2020
JIU-JITSU
My mother always wanted me to do martial arts. I started capoeira at four years old. As a kid I was never great at conventional sports, but in martial arts I found something I understood right away. The discipline, the repetition, the respect, the daily improvement. By my early teens I had specialized in muay thai and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I was an elite athlete, training three times a day. I trained in competitive adult teams while I was still a child, often the only kid in the room. At sixteen I was Spanish national runner-up in muay thai, and Canary Islands runner-up in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. For most of that part of my life the plan was to compete professionally in MMA. I did not picture any other future for myself.
- 5a3f1ee2018
BAHIA
At fourteen I traveled to Salvador de Bahia in Brazil for a long training trip. I went with a coach and without my family. I trained capoeira, jiu-jitsu, and muay thai there, all at once. Bahia showed me what it looks like when an entire region lives martial arts as part of its daily culture, with a warmth and a humor I had not seen before. I came back fluent in Portuguese. Brazil has held a permanent place in my life since then, and that is the reason this page exists in Portuguese alongside English and Spanish.
- b8e2c102020 → 2022
PIVOT
Around fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen the real cost of competitive martial arts started catching up with me. The weight cuts were the worst part. Dropping weight before every fight through extreme diets and dehydration was wearing my body down. I was losing the love of training. Around the same time I lost a close friend, and that loss made me question whether the path I had imagined was really where I wanted my life to go. The change was not sudden. It came slowly. The lucky part was the people around me. Nami, who pushed me, more than anyone, to start picturing a future for myself, and a group of friends at school who were into technology, computers, video games, and building things. They pulled me into a new world. I started taking programming classes, learned Python, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and discovered that writing code gave me a feeling close to what I felt on the mat. Analyze, try, fail, adjust, build. The same instincts that worked in jiu-jitsu also worked on a screen. Pattern recognition, decisions under pressure, training every day. I had been doing human problem solving with high physical risk. Now I started learning abstract problem solving, less dangerous and just as demanding. I moved into the scientific and technical track in school and began building toward a career in computer science.
- e6d7c402022 → 2026
UPV
Nami and I came to Valencia together for university. She was starting medicine and I was starting computer science at the Universitat Politècnica de València. From the first day I decided my time in computer science was not going to be only about passing exams. I joined every student organization I could find that was doing something real. I tried Hyperloop UPV for a while because I admired Stefan Costea, a more senior student who later went to work as a programmer at Apple in Germany, and I wanted to be the kind of disciplined engineer he was. After some time I realized that what truly obsessed me was the pure problem solving at the core of programming, the place where mathematics and algorithms meet, so I left Hyperloop and went deeper into the fundamentals of computer science. The thing that hooked me hardest was competitive programming. The UPV team had basically died, a Discord channel with under ten people and almost no activity. With my friend Rubén Nieto we rebuilt it. We contacted the old founders, recruited new members, and got the group running again. By the time we were done, CP UPV had around two hundred active members and was the largest competitive programming team in Spain. In my second year I trained for three months as if competitive programming was a full time job. I would wake up, solve problems, eat, solve more problems, sleep. With Rubén Nieto and Juan Martínez, we finished tied for fourth in the UPV regional and eleventh in Spain.
- 2c3a9b52024 → 2026
LEADERSHIP
By my third year I had taken on vice president roles in three student organizations. ACM UPV, GDG on Campus UPV, and CP UPV. The titles were never the point. The point was being able to move things. Organize hackathons, bring companies onto campus, run technical events, connect students with opportunities they would not have found alone, push initiatives that mattered. I am especially proud of the relationship I built with Patricio Letelier, the director of Cátedra HP at UPV, who later wrote me a recommendation letter. Through that community I visited HP in Barcelona, collaborated with UNICC and the United Nations on hackathons, and got close to founders building real products. I co-founded Launchpad, a student incubator inside UPV. The idea came from a problem we kept seeing. Most students only worked on their projects the week before presenting them. I wanted to change that, so we restructured it around weekly Scrum meetings and continuous iteration. Launchpad still has a long way to go, but I am proud of having planted the idea that students should not wait until graduation to start building. Outside the university, Nami and I helped her mother launch Polimarket, a real supermarket inside the UPV campus. It is a family business. Nami’s mother had been running parafarmacias in Tenerife, and the three of us pushed together to open the supermarket. I have worked on Polimarket with the same commitment I would give to a business of my own, because in a real sense I feel like it is. It is a family project, built with the same work ethic my mother raised me with.
- f3d2a91(HEAD -> main)2026-05
NOW
I am closing the student leadership chapter. I am finishing my degree in computer science and engineering and writing my Trabajo Final de Grado, my final project. The next chapter is professional. My main focus now is to become an AI Engineer. I am specializing in deep learning, machine learning systems, voice agents, and applied AI in particular. The computer science degree gave me a strong foundation in backend with Java and Spring Boot. Competitive programming gave me real fluency in C++. With those I can build complete products around the AI work I want to focus on. The part of computer science I love most is where mathematics meets programming, the craft of algorithmic problem solving. It is what pulled me into competitive programming, and it is the lens I carry into everything else. Thinking in algorithms, in the spirit of Algorithms to Live By, is not only for contests. It shapes how I design AI systems and how I make decisions as a founder, where to spend effort, when to stop optimizing, how to act well under uncertainty. I am helping my mother build a technology product based on an AI voice-agent system applied to B2B industry. With my cousins, I am working on another interdisciplinary project that brings together our profiles in industrial, mechanical, and computer engineering to build Organitech, a technology consultancy specialized in premium software for factories and industrial operations. Our first client is Disportela, a textile factory in Colombia and one of the country's main textile exporters. I stepped away from competitive combat sports, but they will always be part of my life, a philosophy I want to keep practicing forever. Long term I want to build at the intersection of artificial intelligence and business. I plan to do an MBA at some point, not as a credential but as a step toward becoming someone who can build, lead, and scale serious technology projects. I want to be a builder. Someone who can go from idea to execution, from problem to solution, from small team to real organization. I want my career to be as international as my life has been. This site, cuxprada.com, is the canonical version of all of that. It exists so the rest of the noise can finally retire.