Introduction Post
Hello, and welcome to my first blog post! In this post, I’ll be reflecting on my journey over the past few years in the world of coding. I'll also give you an overview of how my blog will be structured and the goals it aims to achieve.
Let me introduce myself: my name is Adrian Rubio Punal. I’ve spent most of my life in England, but when I was 8, my family moved to Spain. Now, at 13, I’m passionate about coding and basketball. That’s a bit about me in a nutshell. Over the years, I’ve built a number of projects, and as you get to know me, you’ll see just how much I love the AI industry and how strongly I believe it’s the future.
My 15-year-old brother, Pablo, also shares my passion for coding. One afternoon, at the beginning of summer, he told me he had something exciting to show me. When I walked into his room, I couldn’t help but notice the MacBook on his computer screen. It was then he introduced me to the Hack Club Arcade—a fantastic community of young hackers where you can earn tech-related prizes by coding and building even more projects. That’s how it all began. Up until then, I had completed one or two AI courses, taken some notes, and started working on a few simple AI projects. But after my brother and I both created accounts, the rest was history. We spent the summer of 2024 completely immersed in the Hack Club community, especially the Arcade, where we coded and built nonstop. Now, let me explain how it worked: you’d start coding for an hour, and once you finished, you’d submit what were called “scraps”—proof of your work in the form of GitHub commits. After coding for several hours, you’d submit your completed project to the scrapbook for review. The reviewers would evaluate your work hour by hour, and if they thought it was done correctly, they’d reward you with tickets (1 hour = 1 ticket). With those tickets, you could head to the shop and “buy” cool prizes. By the end of the summer, the Arcade had wrapped up, and I had completed around 72 hours of coding. Some of the prizes I earned included a GitHub plushie and a Keychron K6 Pro. But more valuable than the prizes were the amazing memories I created with my brother and the incredible projects I built. I developed several AI models, all of which are available on my GitHub. I learned a lot throughout the process, and connecting with other young coders on the Hack Club Slack made the experience that much better.
When Arcade ended, school started, and my brother and I joined what Hack Club calls a YSWS (You Ship, We Ship). The idea is simple: if you ship a project, Hack Club ships a prize. For this YSWS, if you built an AI LLM (Large Language Model) from scratch, you would receive a YubiKey and a signed copy of Build an LLM From Scratch by Sebastian Raschka. Both my brother and I completed the challenge, and we earned our prizes. You can check out my LLM project here:
The goal of this blog is to document my coding journey and showcase the projects I build. I plan to post every week about what I’ve worked on, any new ideas I’ve had, or anything code-related that I find worth sharing. Some weeks, I might not have much to post—or might not be able to post at all—but I’ll do my best to stay consistent. This first post was a small introduction to who I am with some of my past and what I love. By now, you probably know that I love AI, and most of my projects will be centered around it.