Before product, frontend, and engineering platforms, there was accessibility

Long before I was thinking about product strategy, frontend architecture, or engineering platforms, I was already learning one of the most important lessons software could teach me:

technology matters most when it helps someone participate more fully in the world.

In 2007, I was part of the team behind ABC+, a software project developed at Escuela Técnica N.º 2 “Luciano Fortabat” in Olavarría. The project focused on accessibility for people with disabilities, and I worked on the module aimed at deaf users and Argentine Sign Language.

That experience stayed with me.

At that stage of life, I probably could not have explained it in product language. I was not thinking in terms like UX, accessibility standards, inclusion strategy, or user-centered systems.

But the core idea was already there: software is not just code. It is access. It is communication. It is autonomy.

Years later, Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies formally recognized the students involved in the development of ABC+, describing it as software created for people with neurolocomotor disabilities, blind or visually impaired users, and later extended to deaf students as well. The same record also mentions that the school had received the Presidential School Solidarity Award for the project. You can find that reference in this official parliamentary record.

Looking back, I think that early experience shaped much more than I realized at the time.

It shaped the way I think about users.
It shaped the way I value clarity.
It shaped the way I understand accessibility.
And it shaped the kind of problems I find meaningful to work on.

A few years later, in 2011, I would also work as a sign language interpreter during exhibitions and public openings at Museo Dámaso Arce in Olavarría. That experience reinforced something I had already started learning: communication only matters when it truly reaches the other person.

That idea never left.

Even now, when I work on software for health systems, industrial platforms, or sports products, part of me is still asking the same question:

Does this help real people understand, act, and move forward more clearly?

Because some of the foundations of my work were never only technical.

They were human first.