Work Experience

Principal Software Engineer at Meroxa

January 2021 - Present (Last updated on October 14, 2024)

I joined this startup in 2021 with the ambitious goal of revolutionizing how companies operate with real-time data. Founded by two ex-colleagues at Heroku, a company of 9 people at that time felt like an exciting change from what Heroku had become, a developer platform driven by an enterprise like Salesforce.

At Meroxa, I joined as a Backend Engineer, working on both Platform Features and our open-source solution, Conduit. During my time at Meroxa, my priorities have always been:

  • Elevating the Developer Experience by finding the simplest solutions to existing problems.
  • Communicating both internally and externally about how our platform and products fit the market. Internally, making sure everyone stays aligned with our mission, and externally finding ways to collaborate with other companies.
  • Increasing automation and enabling practices for delivering features at a more iterative pace.
  • Culturally, finding better ways to communicate and collaborate independently of the employee's geographic location. Making sure no one is left behind.

Here are some of the highlights since I joined at the time of writing:

  • Designed and developed our Meroxa CLI, ensuring it could be easily distributed and operated by anyone while being highly intuitive. This one contains a long list of features, but you can read some about my journey (dated October 11, 2022) on this blog post.
  • Worked on Self-Hosted Environments. My focus was on the CLI and control plane (Platform API).
  • Led and worked on developing Turbine, our company pivot putting the focus on the developer. My main focus was on the CLI, Turbine Go library, and control plane (Platform API).
  • Helped with documentation across all our platform components, including how to operate with our Platform and Conduit.
  • Led and worked on an Intermediate Representation project to move the orchestration for Turbine deployments to our control plane.
  • Worked on Turbine-Core, a gRPC architecture to centralize Turbine libraries and help develop support for other languages (at the time of writing, we support JavaScript, Go, Python, and Ruby).
  • Worked on Turbine-Ruby, announcing this at RubyConf 2022 in Houston.
  • Led the simplification of our platform by leveraging our Conduit OSS, eliminating the need for a specific code SDK using Turbine.
  • Contributed to our CI/CD Platform infrastructure using ArgoCD.
  • Worked on Conduit 0.9, enabling data processing using Wasm processors.
  • Added support for multiple collections to Conduit 0.10, allowing users to fetch and send data to different collections in a single pipeline.
  • Worked on adding Schema support to Conduit on 0.11.
  • Worked on implementing Pipeline Recovery on Conduit, making customer pipelines more resilient. Released on Conduit 0.12.

Changelogs:

Blog posts:

Principal Software Engineer at Heroku

February 2012 - January 2021

As a developer in Heroku, joining a 30+ company back then, I had the opportunity to work on many different projects during the 9 years I worked there, and to contribute building the Engineering Culture they had when I left.

I worn many hats during my time in Heroku, with a period of becoming an Engineering Manager from July 2015 to November 2016, and I led projects for the most part of my time. In 2017, I relocated from San Francisco to Madrid, where I currently live and work remotely ever since.

During my time at Heroku, my most used development languages were Ruby (Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Pliny) and JavaScript (Ember, TypeScript, NodeJS, and some Backbone). I also had to do a thing or two in Go and Elixir.

Some of the projects I helped shipping were building the Heroku Status Site, the main Heroku interface twice (to a Rails Application in 2012 and to an Ember JS application in 2014), Heroku Enterprise, Heroku Teams, Heroku SSO, Heroku Flow (Heroku Button, GitHub Sync, Dropbox Sync (already discontinued), Heroku Pipelines, Heroku Review Apps, Heroku CI.

I helped building the Heroku Platform API, and built the template for the invoices used for more than 7 years. Led and developed a project to increase the collection rate on delinquent accounts. Made extensive contributions to the Heroku CLI (in TypeScript). Worked on pretty much any public interface in Heroku (www.heroku.com, dashboard.heroku.com, blog.heroku.com...). I helped sunsetting an enormous list of services, and some of my latest contributions were regarding Salesforce Evergreen, and other projects haven't shipped yet.

Front End Developer at ideup!

February 2011 - November 2011

ideup! was a perfect and refreshing experience in which I helped developing the most important project of the agency at that time. It required extensive visualizations that would illustrate gas consumption telemetry in a comprehensive way to the customer.

Main technology used was PHP (Symfony2), and although I had to submit some patches here and there, my main focus was on the client side styling everything using SASS, and JavaScript with the help of jQuery to make sense of all DOM manipulation required.

Front End Developer at Vizzuality

February 2010 - February 2011

Vizzuality is the startup I feel most proud of. Joining a team of 3, we shipped a fair amount of high quality projects in a really short time. Every single project required a map to visualize complex data that would tell a story.

My main focus was developing components using Action Script 3.0, using Flex Builder and Adoble Flash, coding interfaces using JavaScript, jQuery, and working in the back-end using Ruby on Rails 2.3.5 and 3.0. Some projects required styling a scrollbar when this was a real headache. I still remember that Taxonomic Browser 😅.

Front End Developer and designer at Sport Life magazine

May 2008 - February 2010

Here, I did a bit of everything (I even had to cover some news). During my time at this magazine, I was the only technical person and worked with journalists to make their dreams come true. I recorded and edited videos, I designed and wrote in Action Script 2.0 and 3.0 an unquantifiable amount of banners to sell anything they wanted to sell online and make more subscriptions. I worked on the CMS that would feed the website. I would re-design and code the website. I coached the team. Here is where I also found my love for running.

Technical Programmer Analyst J2EE at Oesia

October 2006 - May 2008

Back then, I was naive enough to think that in order to make a career, I had to find a job as Java developer.

During my time there I've got to learn about Spring 2.0, EJB 3.0, Struts 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, Maven2, Ant, Bea Weblogic Server 10.0, GlassFish, JUnit Testing, Oracle DB, MySQL, JSP, TLD and JSTL.

Production manager at Workcenter

October 2004 - October 2006

During the time I was trying to make a career out of acting, I worked in this company (like Staples) to end up becoming a Production Manager. I actually end up learning some bits about recruiting (I had to fire the person I had hired a month before), about accountancy, and lots of things about printing.

IT at AENA

June 2000 - August 2004

After an internship from March to June 2000 I was offered a job to work at the airport of Tenerife North, and worked quite extensively providing support to their company airlines, and to the own Airport staff.

I also had to unplug it and plug it back in many times to make things work.

Podcasts

Mindfulness at Work

May 2nd, 2019

Host at Code[ish]

Making Remote Work Work

May 2nd, 2019

Guest at Code[ish]