One hundred and thirty-two books, and where I read them from.

As a boy I travelled with my father from Barinas to Barinitas, in Venezuela, along the road where the flat country starts climbing into the Andes. Jorge Guerrero was playing in the car.

He sings música llanera, the music of the plains. I am Colombian and a llanero from Arauca, and I say both together because they go together. That road is why: the plains are not a landscape to me, they are a sound. A harp, a four-string cuatro, maracas — the whole orchestra — and a voice that holds one note longer than seems possible.

The llano is the grassland that drops off the Andes and stays flat to the Orinoco: cattle, heat, the horizon at eye level. Arauca is the Colombian side of that plain, and its border is a river of the same name. Barinas and Arauca sit on opposite sides of a line, inside the same world: the accent, the food and the music are the same on both banks.

The hallaca proves it. Corn dough coloured with annatto, a stew cooked the day before, a plantain leaf, string, boiling water. It is assembled down a line — one spreads, another fills, another ties — and it is what December tastes like. Venezuela claims it and the Colombian plains claim it too, and both are right: the same dish on both banks of the same river, argued over in earnest over raisins and olives. I grew up eating it on both sides of that argument. That two versions of the same thing can both be correct is, from a distance, most of what I do for a living.

Colombia does not fit inside one region, and that is the pride of it. On the Caribbean coast an accordion, a hand drum and a notched gourd scraper make vallenato, a whole story told in one sitting. From the Magdalena river comes Totó la Momposina, who sang the drum music of those towns exactly as it is sung there, for decades, without sanding it down to travel better. Every region hands over the best it has and sounds nothing like the one next door: two oceans, a mountain range split into three, a different music in every valley.

Bogotá sits at 2,600 metres, where you carry a jacket even on a clear morning. Zipaquirá is an hour away, with a cathedral carved inside a salt mine. Little needs explaining about the anthem: anyone who has stood and sung it in a crowd knows what happens in the chest by the second verse. The national team is the same, and it does not depend on the score.

Childhood in Venezuela, adolescence in Colombia, two years in Adelaide, and today Ecuador. Written in a row it looks like a list of moves. It is not.

Every move takes a certainty away from you. The hour you ate dinner turns out to have been local. Ahorita means something different in each country and never means “now”. Then the serious things: in Adelaide an invoice is a document you issue and keep; in Ecuador it does not exist until the tax authority has authorised it. That is not one screen, that is the shape of the whole system.

That is the habit I was left with: look at what a place takes for granted and ask whether it holds here. It is what an architect does walking into a company. Every company is a small country, with its own language — what it calls a customer, an order, a job — and its own borders. Whoever arrives convinced that their way is the way installs the system from their last job. Whoever has moved several times asks first and configures afterwards.

I read the same way. A book from another country, another decade or another industry is not there to tell me how things are done, but to show me what its author took for granted. That is the part worth having.

So I read to settle something. A book comes in when a question is waiting for it, gets read for the chapter that answers it and picked up later for the rest. Almost all are in English, where what I need appears first; the mathematics and the statistics I look for in Spanish, which is where I think.

Moving also leaves the habit of keeping an inventory. The library is one folder. Every file is named “Title - Author”, and the data inside the PDF says the same as the name outside: if they disagree, search finds nothing. The twenty duplicates were compared by page count and text, not by name: more than once the better-named copy was the truncated one. It is the same work I do on a company's product master: a catalogue nobody trusts is a catalogue nobody opens.

The rest: 17 on business and selling, 16 on foundations — the mathematics, statistics and logic holding the others up — 8 on finance, 3 on Ecuadorian tax rules, and 12 that fit no shelf: Kahneman, Taleb, Meadows, Musashi, Jung, Zweig.

The gaps say as much as the holdings. On Odoo, my daily work, there is exactly one book. On applied security, none. On running teams, none. On English there is grammar and academic writing and not one page of conversation. That is not an excuse: it is next year's shopping list.

Between that road and a book by Kleppmann on distributed systems, read at a desk in Quito, there are four countries. That is why I read as I do: looking for what the author never said, because where he wrote it went without saying.