nerdy

The son of immigrants from the Mexican state of Zacatecas who originally came to this country without papers, Ortega grew up a “sheltered, nerdy kid” in La Puente.

“This is the nerdiest part: I’ve figured out a way to connect the VCR to a modern projector so I can screen movies from the VCR,” he says, laughing at himself.

I could feel the slightly contagious properties of fame; people were looking at me and wondering, Who’s the nerdy journalist standing next to Charlie?

To him, the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he’d once been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds.

Typically, it’s an arcane and extremely nerdy process that occurs once a decade, after the census, and mainly draws attention from a small priesthood of line-drawing experts and political obsessives.