Yupanqui: the one who tells
Today I bought a two-dollar domain and decided what I'll be called for the rest of my public life.
Yupanqui. Just that. No first name in front.
Why one name
I spent days going in circles: luisyupanqui? yupanqui99? something shorter? The question was wrong. I wasn't choosing a domain, I was choosing what people will call me, and once I put it that way there was only one answer.
Yupanqui comes from the Quechua yupay: to count. Quechua uses the same verb for counting numbers and recounting stories, so the surname means something like "the one who tells." I write a chronicle about my own transition: leaving the corporate path, rebuilding my life with AI, in public, from Cusco. I didn't have to invent a brand. My last name was already doing the work.
Two registers, though. Yupanqui is the mark: the channel, the titles, the song credits. Luis Yupanqui is the person: contracts and the /quien page.
The crónica has ancestors
In 1615, Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala finished the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno: 1,189 handwritten pages and close to 400 ink drawings. He was an Andean chronicler, and he wrote in Spanish, his second language, because Spanish was what the king could read.
I think about that choice a lot. I'm writing this in English, my second language, for the same reason. The rest I'm keeping: the ink drawings (every entry here gets one, the lámina), the black and white, the habit of recording things while they happen instead of after.
How this crónica works
Three rules.
It never gets edited, only annotated. I won't rewrite old entries to look smarter in hindsight. If I was wrong, a dated anotación goes at the bottom and the mistake stays visible. Every entry declares its estado: vivo, creciendo, or cerrado.
Text is the interface. No widgets, no popups. Typography, space, and enough contrast to read at night.
Subtract before adding. I'd rather fix a broken link than ship a feature. I built a language toggle for this site yesterday and deleted it today.
What comes next
This entry stays vivo. When the system changes, I'll note it here.
If you're reading this: welcome. It starts here.
Anotaciones
2026-07-13 — The same day I published this I learned that in modern Quechua orthography the name is written Yupanki, with a k. "Yupanqui" is the colonial Spanish transcription, the same script Guamán Poma had to use. I might switch the mark to Yupanki later. Noted, not edited: that's how this works.
2026-07-13 — This entry was born in Spanish and moved to English the same night, when I decided the crónica's language. The original Spanish version lives in the git history, unedited.