Iwas fifteen, 150 kg, and head over heels for the smartest girl in school. One afternoon, some buddies had a naughty-boy idea: hop the fence, swim in the closed school pool. They climbed easily. I couldn't. My arms and chest could not lift my bulk. They didn't taunt me — to their credit — but I walked home with burning tears of rage streaming down my cheeks. Enough was enough. I had to change.
It started with slow, difficult trots while walking my dog. A few meters, stop, pant. A few more. Repetition beat talent: in a year, 30 kg was gone. But I didn't just want to be lighter — I grew up on Ninja Turtles, Hogan, and Schwarzenegger. Sometimes unrealistic standards exist to capture our imaginations and inspire us beyond the ordinary. I wanted to be strong.
The early-2000s fitness industry was fads and hearsay masquerading as information — grapefruit diets, "fat-burning" pills, all of it. Then I found Hugo Rivera's BodySculpting Bible for Men in a local bookstore and studied it like scripture. For years I ran its workouts, tracking everything in Excel. Progress came, then a wall at 115 kg. P90X and more repetition finally got me to 90 kg in 2010 — nine dedicated years of effort.
In graduate school I learned to do proper science. I kept thinking: I should be able to ask "does P90X give me a higher mean bench press than Rivera's Advanced Workouts?" and answer it with dissertation-level rigor. But — school, work, friends, love, life. The software stayed a dream.
A career at Amazon brought long hours, catered everything, and the freshman 15 kg. My mother grew sicker. The scale crept back to 125 kg. Then the pandemic took her — and with her, for a while, my reason for living. I sank into a depression I did not expect to survive.
But the human mind is a strange and contradictory thing. In the middle of that darkness, one absurd thought kept nagging: after all those years of effort, I never got the six-pack. Silly? Superficial? Sure. It was also a rope. Single-minded competitiveness became a curious counterweight to despair. I decided to find out what I could still build.
My mom, Barbara Hidalgo-Toledo, studied journalism, founded a language institute, and rode the dot-com boom as a computer technician — her company, Kompuwiz, sparked my love of technology. I needed to find out if I was capable of building a proper monument to her: a Free and Open Source software framework that carries her company's name, so that one day scientists, engineers, and dreamers can pick up well-crafted tools and say —
Project Pumper is the first realization of that vision — built on Kompuwiz, released as GPLv3, eating my own dog food the whole way down.
We're open-sourcing a data model and API for exercise application interoperability: an exercise and workout library, tracking, and analytics. So people can own their fitness data, move it between platforms, and do Real Science to optimize their gains. Other pumpers are welcome — encouraged — to build better fitness apps on top of it. Iron sharpens iron.