A couple of months ago, I decided to pick up DJing. I still can’t tell if it started as a whim, if it was sparked by watching my friends Robin and Jen (SoundClouds linked!) effortlessly crush their sets, or if it was just something I’d always wanted to do but never knew how to begin.

It was the second week of September, and I had exactly 13 days left in Miami before relocating to New York. One mile from my apartment was a place called Miami DJ Academy. They offered a 10-lesson crash course that promised to take you from complete beginner to playing your first set.

Fuck it, I thought. If there was ever a city to learn how to DJ, it had to be Miami — a place where nightlife is practically a sport, where people commit to nothing except vibes, and where Space (yes, the club that basically never closes) sits like a shrine to chaos. One of my friend’s coworkers actually goes to Space at 6am to get a dance in before work.

So I signed up. And somehow, my instructor turned out to be Space’s first-ever resident DJ. Iconic. I went to class every day, learning everything from beat-matching to finally understanding what at least 70% of the buttons and dials actually do.

“DJing is more than just pressing buttons, hur,” Robin texted me after I breathlessly updated him following every single lesson. (He was right. Unfortunately.)

Two weeks later, I was officially a graduate of the Miami DJ Academy. I even have a certificate to prove it. I agonized over a DJ name: DeBoRaH (pronounced deh-boar-rah) had potential, so did D.Sol and DeeSun. Honestly, it’s surprisingly hard to make a cool moniker out of your own name. In the end, I went back to safronova. For people who knew me in my early crypto days, it was my Discord handle. For people who knew me in middle school, it was my gaming handle.

Now it’s my DJ name.

I don’t like half-assing anything. Not in love, not in work, not in life. And definitely not in hobbies. I watch NFL games in multiview every week. I have a poker table in my apartment. I found a publisher for my writing. I’ve spent hours leveling up my vibe-coding — from simple frontend apps to smart contracts that distribute split payments, to running server-side actions on Privy wallets.

So when it came to DJing, I felt like I had to be equally extra. If I was going to learn a new skill in my thirties, I wanted to do it properly: to be a beginner with intention, with joy, and with the kind of unnecessary enthusiasm that makes life feel full.

Cue the inevitable: a completely unnecessary $3,000 all-in-one controller. My only moral victory was knocking $500 off the price by driving an hour in peak traffic to the depths of Queens to pick it up from a mom-and-pop audio store that’s been around longer than I’ve been alive.

I lugged this unwieldy piece of machinery home, unboxed it, and tapped the power button. As a constellation of LEDs flickered awake, I wondered, What have I done?

And in that moment, the answer to that question felt like mild horror — a full audit of my life choices and financial decisions. But after sitting with my XDJ-XZ lovingly for a few weeks, that answer has shifted. It’s become one of gratitude, excitement, and a soft, sparkly kind of naïveté.

Writing is still my truest creative outlet, but mixing music is suddenly a very close second. I’ve spoken about my love of curation before. It’s one level of abstraction when it’s about a physical space, and an entirely different one when it’s about shaping a mood, a memory, a night. Suddenly, I was scratching a part of my brain I didn’t even know needed attention.

I’ve been practicing in every spare moment. I even received a friendly noise complaint barely a month into moving into my apartment.

I’d been planning to make this Latin mix since the day I left Miami. It was meant as a soft goodbye, with the working title Gracias por todo, Miami. But now that I’m here in Buenos Aires this week, something in me has shifted. The nostalgia is still there, warm at the edges, but what’s louder now is possibility.

Maybe that’s what learning something new does. It tilts you forward. It asks you to stay open, to stay searching, to meet life where it’s going instead of where you left it. A quieter kind of courage. A willingness to be surprised.

So this is the mix that came out of that feeling: Buscando un Porteño.
Enjoy.