Acknowledgements

This book talks a lot about tools, judgment, curiosity, and the shrinking distance between an idea and something you can actually test. But none of that appears out of nowhere. You learn to look, to insist, and to keep asking questions because, before that, someone made room for it to happen.

First, my parents.

Thank you for all the sacrifices you made so my siblings and I could have an education, resources, and opportunities that were not always easy to get. When I think about technology, I do not start with the cloud, or models, or agents. I often start much earlier, with that Amstrad CPC 6128 that cost 100,000 pesetas.

I do not think I will ever forget that number.

Back then, I did not really understand what it meant. Now I do. It was not just a computer. It was a bet. It meant putting a serious amount of money on the table so a kid could touch something that felt as if it had come from the future. That gesture opened a door I am still walking through. So many of the things I have been able to learn, build, break, fix, and try again start there, even if at the time all I could see was a screen, a keyboard, and the possibility of making something obey an idea.

I also think about my grandparents. One of them seemed to know every subject in my engineering degree, including nuclear engineering, as if knowledge were simply something you were expected to keep within reach. The other taught me to look for mushrooms by reading the slope from the other side. With a walking stick involved too, yes. Different lessons, different worlds, but both left me with the same idea: pay attention, learn how things work, and do not assume the surface is telling you the whole truth.

I also want to thank my family.

Thank you for putting up with me when I grab hold of a subject and become, let us say, a little intense. And this book, if we are honest, leaves plenty of documentary evidence that this happens. Some subjects get stuck inside me until I have taken them apart, explained them, put them back together, and tested them from three different angles. It is not always comfortable to be near someone in that mode.

Also, I do not always manage to make myself understood. Sometimes because the subject is strange. Sometimes because I am going too fast. Sometimes because my head has already made three jumps and my mouth is still on the first one. I am still on medication, so a bit of margin is probably wise. But even on those days, or especially on those days, having a family that is there, that waits, asks, laughs a little, and also knows how to set limits, is a huge gift.

This book was not written inside a calm bubble. It was written between work, family, tiredness, technical obsessions, stolen hours, and conversations that sometimes began as a throwaway comment and ended up touching something serious. So it is yours too, even if you had to listen more than once to an explanation you probably had not asked for.

And thank you to my colleagues and managers across the different companies where I have worked. I have taken something from every place: a way of looking at problems, a standard, a kind of patience, a warning about what should not be repeated. A career is not built only from projects. It is also built from the people who correct you, push you, let you try, stop you in time, or ask a question that keeps turning in your head.

Work has also taken me much further than I could have imagined as a child. I have had the chance to visit countries such as Japan and the United States through projects around emerging technologies, with international teams trying to understand each other while the ground was still moving under the tools. Those trips were not tourism in disguise. They were work, team building, and sometimes a fairly strong cultural shock all at once. They showed me how much changes when a project forces you to explain yourself across languages, habits, assumptions, and ways of reading the room.

I especially want to thank the environment of this latest professional stage. I do not take it for granted that I get to work in a place where there is room for the "what if" moments and also the "hold me the drink" ones; those moments when someone pulls on a thread, someone else joins in, the conversation speeds up, and suddenly an idea stops being a passing thought and becomes something worth testing.

Being part of an environment like that has been a stroke of luck. Earned luck, in a way, because these spaces do not appear by themselves. They are built with trust, responsibility, and people willing to think a little beyond their box without losing respect for work done properly.

If this book contains anything useful, it comes from there too. From a family that gave me room to learn. From parents who made a bet before I even knew how to name it. From grandparents who taught me, in very different ways, to look more carefully. From people who have put up with my loops, my enthusiasm, and my incomplete explanations. And from teams where asking "what if..." was not a waste of time, but sometimes the beginning of something.