Soft Skills
Leadership
Serving my team, most of whom are located in a remote office. I am dedicated to helping each individual grow and achieve their goals while also ensuring that we successfully meet our company objectives. Promoting a highly collaborative and cohesive team environment by championing the concept of Cross-Functional Long-Lived teams aligned to Value Streams (inspired by the book Sooner Safer Happier). This approach fosters strong relationships between Developers, QA, Product, and Project teams, resulting in improved communication, efficiency, and overall success.
Mentorship
As a mentor, I am dedicated to providing guidance and support to developers at all levels. I actively promote best practices and standards through code reviewing, engaging tech talks, presentations, creating comprehensive training materials, and very frequent communication. Also helping recruiting department with hiring events by engaging with the students and providing them with information about the company and the opportunities available, as well as technical demonstrations.
Communication
I am an effective communicator who believes in setting clear expectations. I provide frequent reporting to management at all levels and conduct regular all-hands meetings to ensure the entire team is aligned and receives consistent messages about our goals. I also value the importance of individual connections and regularly engage in 1:1 meetings with my direct and skip-level reports to provide feedback, coaching, and to actively listen to their concerns and ideas.
Other
- Performing 1st and 2nd round interviews for new dev and intern applicants. Highly involved on hiring events.
- Creating training content to be added to our documentation and new hire training material.
- Actively participating on architecture and design of new products. Working closely with product on creation and review of specs before they are handed to the teams.
- Company warrior, helping the company succeed at all levels and representing it beyond my department and duties.
- Bilingual English, Spanish.
Technical skills
Cloud Services
Big fan of GCP and Cloudflare. I use GCP for my main personal project Racearoni, I started using GCP back in 2010 when GAE was still in beta, this is one of the reasons I rewrote this project to Java, as GAE didn't have other language options back then. AWS for projects like Carbonetech and VGRelease. At Paycom everything is on our own cloud service that operates very similarly to AWS, we are also using AWS on some specific use cases. I recently started playing with Azure, where I'm planning to host at least one of my next projects. This portfolio is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I also use Cloudflare as my CDN, DNS provider for all my projects and registrar for my TLDs they support.
Reactive Libraries and Frameworks
I absolutely love React, currently using React at work and pretty much all my projects including my last Racearoni rewrite (both in typescript) and the next version of this portfolio (coming soon). Used Vue in the past for other personal projects. I have used Angular when I worked at QuiBids. At work we have our own UI component library, but on my own projects I use Tailwind UI for React and Vuetify for Vue. During some time I was very interested on React Native and Ionic, but came to the conclusion that, for my specific applications, a progressive web app written in React was more suitable as it can be installed on your device without having to go through the app store. I make use of workers, push notifications, and more, to make it behave like a native app. Have been using Vite as framework for my React projects and I'm very happy with it.
Databases
My favorite part of every project is the database design. If you have a good DB design, the rest of the project will be easier to implement, adapt and maintain. I use MySQL at Paycom and many of my personal projects. I love designing and optimizing for best performance. I am really good at query optimization, have a good understanding of how the engine works, and performance tools available. Good at choosing indexes and deciding when they are necessary or a bad choice. Fan of using JSON columns when applicable to bring some of the benefits of NoSQL to a relational database, as well as creating virtual columns for json column property indexing. I like the spatial features on MySQL but this is one area where Mongo is simpler to use. I have used Mongo on my previous job and currently in projects like Carbonetech. I have experimented with many other DB engines like GCP Firestore.
Interpreted Languages and Frameworks
PHP is the language I have the most experience with. I started using it in 2003 and have been using it in both personal and work projects ever since. One of my favorite frameworks to use with PHP is Laravel, which I currently utilize in multiple projects, including Racearoni. I am really good at memory and performance optimization, and I have been able to dramatically improve the performance of multiple projects. I actively share my micro optimization recommendations and techniques with my team through merge requests comments and Tech Talks. I have also worked with Python on various personal projects, such as developing a same-day trading bot using the Alpaca API, as well as other smaller projects. During my previous job, I had the opportunity to work with Node.js, and I found it to be a great tool for building server-side low-latency applications.
Interpreted Languages and Libraries
I started my career using vanilla javascript but shortly after discovered the benefits of using libraries like jQuery, underscore, and others. Nowadays I use Typescript at work and all my personal projects, I love the benefits of having a strongly typed language, and the ability to use the latest features of javascript.
Compiled Languages
Currently at work, most of the services my team owns are written in .NET C#, I participated initially on the creation of these services and nowadays I perform code reviews. Currently, I am utilizing Swift to develop an engaging tvOS dancing game that incorporates the Continuity iOS camera feature. This project serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating how an experienced developer can quickly build an app with the help of AI, without prior knowledge of the language or framework. I have ambitious plans to release this game on the App Store in the near future. I used Java long time ago, when building Xparency and on one of my Reacearoni rewrites when I deployed this project on GAE.
Development Tools & Package Managers
Using Docker for all my projects, I have a good understanding of how to create images, use docker-compose, and deploy using Kubernetes. I have used Git for many years now and cannot imagine development without these tools. I use GitLab at work (previously BitBucket), I have recently migrated all my repos from BitBucket to GitHub. I use package managers on all my projects, and I have written packages for npm, composer, and nuget.
HTML, CSS, Sass, LESS
I used HTML and CSS on many web applications. I utilized Bootstrap before, but now I'm a big fan of Tailwind CSS and Tailwind UI, and I use it on all my projects with the exception of this portfolio, which uses Bootstrap 5. I have played with Material UI before too. I have used Sass and LESS on many projects. Not great at creating my own designs so I like using libraries that help me put together my ideas without having to spend too much time on the design.
Development Automation Tools
Automation tools are a must for any project. I used Webpack, now Vite on some projects. I used Gulp at my previous and current jobs, as well on some personal projects. Decided to use Grunt for this portfolio site to try it out.
And many more...
I like experimenting. I have used many other languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools. I think you are not able to properly compare and chose a favorite if you haven't tried all options available. I code on my Mac at home, Windows at work. I've used many IDEs and editors, but my current favorite is VS Code, before JetBrains products, which are really good too. For remote communication I use Teams and Zoom at work, I have used Slack and recently started to play with Discord. I love "pair programming" with paid versions of Github Copilot and ChatGPT. Use Algolia Search in couple of my projects. I have used ElasticSearch, and Solr in the past. Using Splunk at work, have used Datadog before, and use Sentry on personal projects. Use Jira and Confluence at work, used YouTrack before. Big fan of Google APIs and services: Maps, translation, analytics, TtS/StT, I have used many of them. RESTful API creation and consumption. Testing suite utilization, and test driven development experience. Accessibility is important so I am planing on updating this portfolio and my projects to be more accessible as per WCAG standards. Crazy about optimization and performance, can save a lot of money on infrastructure and cloud costs by optimizing your services!