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Juan José Islas

Drawn to systems around us — how parts interact to make things work — human behavior, and the unfamiliar.

Looking for what repeats beneath them.

Making things to explore what I discover.

Juan José standing on a fog-covered forest trail, dwarfed by tall trees fading into the mist.

Now

What currently has my attention.

Building

Leading Muverna toward its first 1,000 users.

Success = # of experiments X luck.

Exploration

Learning drums and working on body mobility.

Observing what my mind and body can do with short daily practice.

Personal experiment

Practicing non-thinking (mushin) to be present, in harmony and with headspace.

Experimenting with different ways to live better.

Things I Make

Muverna

My biggest experiment so far.

I built Muverna after realizing that the way I was trying to grow wasn’t working anymore. I tested a different approach — replacing self-judgment and control with curiosity, and failure with information. Then I built a tool around that way of seeing.

Explore Muverna →
Muverna app screen showing an active experiment: a 10-day commitment to spend 20 quiet minutes without a phone each morning.
Two women in headscarves pause on a street beside a weathered old fort wall, an ornate street lamp overhead.

Photography

My way to observe how people actually live.

I travel to encounter what I don’t already know, looking at how people live, behave, and make meaning through their everyday lives, rituals, and beliefs. Photography is the artifact of that exploration — a way of paying attention to what is different, and what turns out to be universal.

See the photographs →

Technology

My way of understanding, building, and improving systems.

I look for bottlenecks, unnecessary complexity, and better ways for things to work — from how technology gets built and delivered to how products feel and organizations make decisions. I build, experiment, learn new technologies, and use data to find simpler approaches instead of repeatedly solving the same problem.

Explore Technology →

About

I've always been interested in what happens beneath the obvious — in people, systems, places, and in my own way of doing things. This site is where I collect some of what I find along the way.

About Juan José →