Here we are with a new installment in my entrepreneurial adventures.

I have been programming for more than half my life—32 years to be exact, since I started at eight—although I’ve occasionally made choices that led me away from my constant passion: having “conversations” with machines through code. Geeky, right? Well, what I’m about to tell you is even stranger.

In web development, app creation, algorithm design, and more, I never “needed” to build a plugin. Writing specific functions was always enough—often replacing plugins entirely, at least when it comes to CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.

However, in my quest to write less code each day while prioritizing performance and speed, I turned to a site builder to accelerate web creation without sacrificing customization or loading times—especially one that wouldn’t add 500 KB per page and push 3G mobile loads past 10 seconds.

Oxygen Builder

That’s how I discovered Oxygen: a builder that’s far from user-friendly, in my opinion only suitable for those comfortable with PHP and JavaScript.

But to keep this brief (though it might not stay that way), I ended up needing to create a plugin to load my custom functions the correct way in WordPress.

You heard that right—how can I call myself a web developer if I’d never created a plugin until now? A plugin is simply a CMS feature I hadn’t needed to exploit before, and it represents an even simpler layer of web development (exclusively for CMSs, whether custom or third-party). High-level or low-level programming, object-oriented or not, has nothing to do with whether you’ve built plugins.

At its most basic, a WordPress plugin is just a folder and a PHP file that leverage WordPress’s hooks and APIs to run code that performs some action. Period.

It literally took me one minute to create—one of the easiest things I’ve ever done in code.

What does it do? It defines the set of functions I want to execute in specific scenarios.

If you’ve worked with WordPress, you know the “child theme” concept of your chosen template. In the “themeless” setup I now use, there is no theme—no parent, child, sibling, cousin, or any other relative. I have to get extremely creative to give my applications structure and personality. But the payoff is lightning-fast performance!

I won’t go into more detail now; I’ll explain where it’s running and why it works that way later. Just know it’s for the backend of the startup I co-founded and CTO—RealViewFit—in one of the apps that make up its cloud architecture.

Live long, and prosper!

Interview with ProntoPro

In my personal branding journey, I’ve made some interesting contacts over the past few months, and the digital editors at ProntoPro—a nationwide platform connecting clients with professionals, consultants, and companies—asked to interview me.

Key Questions

• What recommendations do you have for clients who hesitate when choosing the best web design option?
• What should a website have to be successful?
• How do you stay updated with the latest web design trends?
• How is your team structured?
• What competitive advantages do companies that invest in an online presence have over those that haven’t decided to do so yet?
• Which operating system do you prefer for web design—coding in HTML or using a content management system—and why?

Yes, the last question comes with a caveat, which I clarify in my responses.

I was interviewed last week, and the article was published today. You can read the interview here: Interview on ProntoPro.

Ongoing Projects

In addition to my day-to-day work and collaborations, I’m currently participating in an accelerator alongside a founding team project (as CTO and co-founder) in the fitness, health, and sports sector called RealViewFit (as mentioned in the interview).

We are developing the initial phases of business model validation, creating the minimum viable product, planning our marketing strategy, and preparing our first funding round, which will take place in May. The project already has private seed funding, and the entire team is very excited about it (myself included).

Live long, and prosper.

Welcome to RuymanBorges.com

This post is simply intended to welcome you to my new website. I decided to keep it minimal because I believe that less is more. Élite Empresarial began with the goal of being a Swiss Army knife for entrepreneurs, but I think that kind of toolkit is personal—every project requires its own specialization.

In this new phase of my site, I want to focus on sharing information about my projects and offering opportunities for anyone who wants to get involved.

What Am I Currently Doing on RuymanBorges.com and Other Projects?

I personally handle the marketing for my most important clients—those I’ve been working with for several years (and who have been working with me). They need someone who knows their niche, their project, and their way of thinking, and who can adapt evolving marketing tools to their objectives. In their few attempts with “big companies” or “would-be gurus,” they ended up with undeserved setbacks and asked me to resume that activity. I’m happy to help, although it does occupy large chunks of my schedule and limits my ability to start or create more of my own projects.

Well, I realize I began at the end—like writing you a summary before the story. Let me correct that:

A Bit of History About Me

This is probably my seventh or eighth blog. I began writing “publicly”—subjectively, about my thoughts and experiences—around 2006 (though I had been jotting down ideas since around 1992 and started a thematic blog in 2005).

My Introduction to Digitalization

I consider myself a digital traveler more than an entrepreneur. I’ve been tinkering with any gadget containing circuits since I was three or four years old, and by age eight I was writing BASIC code on an Amstrad CPC with 64 KB of memory. Back then we still used cassettes instead of floppy disks, and I didn’t encounter a computer mouse until about three years later. I don’t know who bought the first joystick in Tenerife, but I vividly remember visiting nine or ten computer stores before one finally showed us a square device with a vertical stick and a red circular button—like we were crazy in 1989.

My Early Advanced Steps in ICT

In short, technology and I go way back. I’ve always had my nose in computer magazines and programming books. In 1998, I enrolled in a computer science degree at university but got so bored that I decided I’d learn on my own—at my own pace (which turned out to be faster than their five-year program). Fortunately, the internet, technology, information, and social attitudes about what it means to “know” have all evolved since then.

A Small Detour (That Isn’t One)

Well… yes, I did return to university ten years later—after a few adventures, courses, programming languages, and projects under my belt—but not for computer science. Instead, I pursued another passion: physics. The other books I read were on physics, chemistry, astrophysics, and related topics, so I went back purely out of curiosity and to delve into that world through formal education. I nearly completed the degree—had I decided to commit to nuclear physics—but… no thanks. I’m not a “lab rat.” I prefer an open, ever-changing world full of challenges, not a single-focus path for life. I hope my former classmates and fellow scientists aren’t offended—they have my utmost respect. I’m just a curious soul.

Wrapping Up the Intro

I needed to correct my backward introduction to this first post. Now that we’ve made proper introductions, I hope reading this and my other entries makes more sense and helps you understand why I pursue these projects and what may drive me in the future.

On my homepage, you’ll find links to my own projects and to my professional social networks. Because this blog is exactly that: professional. I want to share my digital adventures, my interests, and why I make one decision or another in these increasingly dynamic times.

And with that, I’ll sign off this entry. I was going to make it longer, but I realized it’s better to share the rest in my next post.

I was going to ask you to subscribe and all that, but I really don’t have a newsletter here—yet! Stay tuned if you want updates on my new posts. For now, they’ll appear here and on the respective blogs of my projects, but I may launch a Vlog in the future.

Oh, almost forgot: I’ve decided to title the blog “From Bit to QBit with Artificial Intelligence.” I think it’s self-explanatory, but you’ll see what I mean in time.

Live long, and prosper!