What gets passed down
Technical talent in Durango is in better shape than many think. The gap isn't capacity — it's the craft around it.
I had barely walked past the work tables in one of the rooms when a student stood up. Before I had finished getting my bearings, he was already in front of me. He asked if I was one of the judges, gave me his full name, extended his hand, and said something I hadn't heard in years: I hope what I'm about to present will be to your liking.
Honestly, my first thought was that the gesture was excessive. An event with a hundred students running between cables and coffee didn't seem like the place for that kind of formality. It took me a few seconds to realize I was reading it wrong: what looked like protocol was respect, and of a kind you almost never see anymore.
I had arrived at Instituto Tecnológico de Durango half an hour before the judges' call time, planning to walk the building slowly, retrace hallways I'd walked more than two decades ago, find the organizers without rushing, and greet some of the teachers from those years who are still there, still teaching, still shaping the next generation. When I recognized one of them — the same one who, twenty-five years ago, used to push me to think outside the lines the curriculum drew — it became clearer why I was there.
There's something particular about going back to a place where the teachers you had are the same ones these kids have. The buildings can be new, the students' faces too, but the voice from the classroom next door — you still recognize it.
The challenge given to the teams was concrete: solve social or civic problems in the city of Durango. Not an abstract exercise about some distant case study, but the city itself. What hurts here, what fails here, what could be done better here. Twenty-three teams, twenty-four hours, more than a hundred minds thinking about how to improve the place where they live.
I'm going to say the first thing I saw, with as much honesty as I can muster: the technical talent was there, and it wasn't faked talent or inflated talent or showy talent. It was there, and it showed. What some teams managed to build in twenty-four hours was, simply put, exceptional: platforms already running, integrations that responded, ideas thought through with care and executed by hands that had clearly spent time on a keyboard. Some of these kids showed something no curriculum teaches and that you notice when it appears: natural talent, the kind that comes with the person and only needs a stage to surface.
The effort was in the air too. When you walk into an auditorium where people have been working for ten, twelve, eighteen hours without rest, the spilled coffee, the tangle of chargers, and the looks on their faces tell you everything. Nobody was there as filler; everyone was playing for real.
Hours later, when it was time for the same student who had greeted me at the entrance to present, I discovered something else I hadn't expected: he had built his project alone. It was a team of one: hardware he had assembled himself, software running on top of it, a full platform working end to end. Right before his turn he ran into a technical issue he couldn't fix on the spot; we offered to swap his slot with the last team so he could take a few minutes.
There was no rush on his face. No sign of panic.
When he came back, his demo was flawless. No hesitation, no arrogance, with solid answers to every question and a confidence that didn't come from ego but from the work behind it.
What I was watching was preparation that had become habit. In the body, it registers as calm.
That brought me back to a scene from twenty-three years ago. We were presenting at the National Entrepreneurship Event, representing ITD, before another panel of judges and on another stage, when the power went out in the middle of the presentation. The monitors went dark, the equipment went dark, everything went dark. Almost by reflex, I had set a laptop aside with the presentation already loaded. I brought it over to the judges' table and we continued as if nothing had happened. It wasn't courage and it wasn't talent; it was, simply, that we had shown up prepared. What I saw in that kid that afternoon was the same: resilience that doesn't shout — it shows. And it's learned quickly when someone points the way.
What did worry me, and I'm saying it because it has to be said, was what was missing around the code.
Most teams spent two minutes laying out the problem they were going to solve. Two minutes, out of the four they had total. By the time the demo came around — the only thing that really matters at an event like this — they had barely two left. Twenty seconds would have been enough to describe the problem, and twenty well-written seconds are worth more than two minutes without focus.
There were demos with very polished, well-built interfaces sitting on top of technical executions that couldn't survive a deeper question. And there was also the opposite: solid technical work wrapped in something that didn't do it justice. Storytelling, business model, cost and investment analysis, sales pitch: the strategic side of a product, which isn't an accessory but half the work, was practically untouched in almost every project. Not out of laziness, but out of not knowing. Nobody has told them that this muscle gets trained too.
There's one more observation I don't want to skip. Out of twenty-three projects focused on social and civic problems, only two proposed using artificial intelligence as part of their solution. And very few, you could tell, had leaned on AI tools to support their own development. The generation that has had AI within arm's reach since before leaving high school still isn't using it as a work tool, isn't building it into the how of solving the problems of their own city. I'm not talking about using it as a trend; I'm talking about not reaching for the biggest lever currently available to build faster, further, and better.
That gets taught, too. And it gets learned.
I left the Tec that afternoon with two certainties and one intention.
The first is that the technical talent in Durango is fine. Better than many think. The second is that the gap isn't capacity, it's the craft around capacity, and that — unlike talent — does depend on who is willing to sit down and pass it on.
The intention is clear in my mind, but I'm not going to give it concrete shape here yet. In due time, I'll share it.
Thanks to ACISTI for the invitation and for the impeccable organization of the event. To the Tech Crafters community for the outreach and the support. To the teachers at ITD who are still teaching there, with the same energy they had twenty-five years ago. And to the more than one hundred kids who spent twenty-four hours building things from scratch to improve the city where they live, for reminding me that the craft only gets passed down when someone decides to pass it on.
See you soon.