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Overview

I am primarily a backend developer with 13+ years of experience working with US and Europe-based startups, the startup world often makes people wear many hats so I’ve also often been in charge of infrastructure, project management, and other various things required to bring a project to success.

I’ve worked in several product companies from general-public applications at scale to fintech, cybersecurity and developer oriented saas, I guess that makes me a bit of a jack of al trades.

Table of Contents

Experience

For the last five years I’ve been a senior developer at Pexels (a Canva subsidiary) doing, well, a bit of everything from normal feature development to cybersecurity, infrastructure, and bit of management. Serving about two billion requests per day is a fun challenge which required me to work on some interesting architectural problems to guarantee scalability.

My first software job was at a local software company called Netgate in 2010, coding for a voice over IP solution where I started learning the basic of the craft, as well as the joys and despairs of handling infrastructure and outages.

I later moved on to work at a Ruby consultancy shop called Cubox (and later for Neo, after we were acquired by them) that focused on bay-area startups. Later still I worked with a number of startups directly and even set up and ran a developer/designer collective called 13Floor for a couple of years, and I also ran my own fintech startup for a while, called Cacao, which raised a tiny bit of funding, that was quite an adventure.

The bigger projects I helped build in my early years where Marqeta, a technology company focusing on payment processing that went on to power the Facebook Card, moving on to work at CloudApp helping millions of users share their files with the best possible experience, and later still I took over as lead developer for Chefs Feed in the middle of a complete platform rewrite, we pulled through! Their amazing-looking site is still very much humming along, better than ever.

Finally I’ve also worked on stuff for heavy-hitters like AT&T and Apple, but their NDAs are imbued with an ancient Egyptian curse which Brendan Fraser has insisted on not releasing into the world, so my lips are sealed.

Tech Stack

While I started with Python my strongest languages are Ruby and Go, yes: I’ve used Rails for a number of years and have become intimately familiar with it, although these days I prefer simpler web toolkits when given a choice. I love APIs, and have a lot of fun building REST and GraphQL APIs for the web, library APIs, or even command line interfaces.

I’ve also worked quite a bit with Lua, Elixir, Shell and others, I speak a bit of JavaScript although it’s not entirely my cup of tea. I fiddle around with new languages all the time for the sake of learning and I’d really love to work on any functional language like Clojure, I very much enjoy the paradigm.

I also have decent knowledge of infrastructure having had to create and deploy new services at scale as well as having to maintain them, I prefer working together with a devops team, but hey: if things need to work, I can get them to.

I am a software developer, learning, thinking and figuring things out is my job description, regardless of the problem.

Open Source

I love open source, few things give me greater pleasure than publishing something and have other people use it and contribute to it, the shared experience of building something in a community just because it’s cool and have that be useful to people.

Nothing beats reading code though, that’s where all the talk stops and yields to reality: I’m particularly fond of my gpm (shellscript, Go-related), disc (Ruby), disco (Go), and philote (Go) projects but you can see more of my code in my github page, or read about some of my projects in my blog’s Open Source section.

Technical Talks

A couple of years back one of my places of employment offered to cover the plane ticket expenses whenever we got accepted to speak at any given conference, I jumped at the opportunity and started sending out as many proposals as I could, it became kind of addictive for a while.

Presenting a talk (particularly a technical one) can be every bit as rewarding as publishing open source code, with a very different interpersonal experience typical to conferences, and mixed with an almost unhealthy amount of adrenaline from taking the stage.

I recommend giving it a try: preparing and executing talks has made me learn as much about technical stuff as about myself, as well as given me some of my best ever memories. If you’re curious head over to my talks page for some videos and slides.

Contact

If you’re still reading there is every chance you might want to get in touch and discuss work stuff, here’s my email:

[email protected]

If for some reason you’re reading this in PDF or (gasp) a printout please, please go to my site and read the actual thing on the web, I will attempt to calibrate my time machine to rescue you from the eighties.

pote.io/ncv

Seriously, you don’t even have to type it: scan this QR and you’ll be there.

Thanks for staying this long!