I'm a Computer Engineer which has been developing software for more than 10 years now. After founding a startup I've had the opportunity to learn other skills like: analyzing business models, raising money, hiring/firing, managing projects, data-informed decision making, UX, graphic design and online marketing.
September 2014 - July 2016, 1 year and 11 months
Histories - Amazing historical facts near you. In our third and last startup pivot we developed an app that teaches you history when walking around. When you walk by a historical site you will receive a notification with a short history article which tells the story of what happened there.
Our app was downloaded 500,000 times and used by more than 100,000 users each month, included more than 5,000 location based history articles of Spain and London and received an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 from 2,000 reviews.
During this time we were granted with 50k€ and we managed to get 1% of the users to pay 6€ on average unfortunately we couldn't reach a large enough user base to create a profitable business.
In this last stage we were 5 in the team although 2 were working full time on the content. During this stage our main focus was to take a data driven approach when taking decisions. We measured user activity and behaviour to learn which features made sense and which could be discarded. We started to control our software quality with metrics too and published to production apps with 99.5% crash-free sessions.
Tools used:Agile developmentSCRUMData-drivenPivotal TrackerMixpanelCrashlytics
I extended our backend so it could persist the progress of the users in our new app. The architecture had to handle the requests of thousands of users (more than 100 requests per second), we had no problem handling this load due to our scalable architecture.
Tools used:JavaScriptHTTP RESTLinuxNGINXNode.jsRestifyMongoDBGit
Lots of the effort was dedicated to develop a low-battery consumption algorithm to unlock content as the user passed through certain locations even with the application in background.
Tools used:JavaAndroid StudioGoogle Play ServicesGit
Replicated the app developed for Android.
Tools used:SwiftXcodeCore LocationCore DataMapKitGit
April 2013 - August 2014, 1 year and 5 months
Kolobee - Tourism apps. In our second pivot we created an app builder. This app builder was created to allow city councils and bloggers to easily create apps that served as tourist guides. The user would create points on a map with photographs, descriptions, etc. and then an app would be created with that content automatically.
Our most important milestones during this time were: to be granted with 206k€ by the Spanish government, to release 200 apps with our app builder and to reach more than 250,000 users. Unfortunately we couldn't convert city councils into paying customers and therefore failed to achieve a successful business model.
In this second stage we were 4 in our team we had a frontend developer and a graphic designer working with us. Thanks to our previous well thought out architecture we managed to reuse great part of our previous technology.
We decided to develop our apps natively even though it meant duplicating the work because at the time no cross-platform development framework allowed us to achieve the product quality we desired.
Tools used:Agile developmentSCRUMPivotal Tracker
Created a script to automatically create mobile apps. It downloaded the content the user had uploaded, built an offline map and created the apps from the iOS and Android templates. It was a real challenge to compress the offline maps so they didn't take lots of space in the apps.
Tools used:BashOpenStreetMaps
Modified our previous web based CMS to allow users to fill the app information and create apps from their content.
Tools used:HTMLJavaScriptCSSLESSAngularGit
Created a template app from which all our apps would be generated. The app was used as a tourist guide, it contained an offline map with the points of interest and each point had images and text. Users could log using their Facebook accounts to share, like or comment the points of interest.
Tools used:JavaAndroid StudioGoogle Play ServicesMapBoxFacebook SDK
Replicated the template app developed for Android.
Tools used:Objective-CXcodeCore LocationCore DataMapBoxFacebook SDKGit
March 2012 - March 2013, 1 year and 1 month
Kolobee - Interesting things nearby. In this first stage our startup developed a location based social network. People collaborated in interest groups to locate things they liked on a map. For example a group could spot and locate: cool graffitis, vegan restaurants or fishing spots.
We developed a working product for the web and iPhone in which more than 1,000 users signed up but we failed to reach a critical mass of users for the product to generate real value.
During this stage we were 4 in our team, we had a frontend developer and a graphic designer working with us. We successfully managed to ship a high quality product with very little resources and time. But, we did fail to build a simple product (MVP) as we jammed the product with all the cool features we could imagine.
One of the best decisions we took was to split the platform into multiple services. One that took part of the core business logic providing web services to use it (API) and two other parts: the web client and the iOS app. Another key decision to keep costs down was to use only one programming language in almost all parts of the development which greatly reduced context switching improving our efficiency.
Tools used:Agile developmentSCRUMPivotal Tracker
Thought out an architecture that would last and would be useful in the long run, the result was an stateless server that could be easily scaled. Offered a REST API to the web a mobile app clients to authenticate, upload content, chat and query content nearby.
Tools used:JavaScriptHTTP RESTLinuxNGINXNode.jsRestifyMongoDBImageMagickGit
Created a dynamic web app that allowed users to upload images while interacting with a map to localize them which proved to be a challenge and a great learning experience.
Tools used:HTMLJavaScriptCSSLESSAJAXNode.jsExpressBootstrapBackbonejQueryGoogle MapsGit
Built an app that could do all the functionalities of our web. Users took pictures with the app and then the image was uploaded with the current user location. A map showed all the content around and users could chat with each other.
Tools used:Objective-CXcodeCore LocationCore DataMapKitGit
October 2009 - March 2012, 2 years and 6 months
BBVA - Corporate Investment Banking. BBVA is a multinational Spanish banking group. I worked for the Corporate Investment Banking branch.
Our team developed and maintained an in house derivatives pricing platform. Lot of effort was put to improve the quality of the software creating tests and refactoring code.
I created an aspect-programming framework to parse and serialize XML to considerably reduce the code needed develop new data structures.
Lead the development of a service to automate the deployment of the app to production.
Tools used:JavaJUnitJ2EEOracle databaseBatchSubversion
October 2008 - June 2009, 9 months
Afi. Afi is a leading Spanish provider of advisory, consultancy and training services in economics and finance.
Involved in the development and maintenance of a financial web portal, I managed to drastically improve the page loading times.
Did a case study to analyze if changing the web portal framework would bring a clear benefit.
Applied a new learned technology to create a financial calculator for customers to calculate their loan payments.
Tools used:C#PythonDjangoAdobe FlexSubversion
2016
Andrew Ng a recognized machine learning researcher taught me the history and basics of machine learning. Focusing on logistic regression and neural nets in the course we applied this algorithms to real world problems.
2004 - 2009
Lots of knowledge was condensed in these years which covered both the most technical and abstract parts of computer science. Learning algorithms and data structures, programming in low-level and high-level languages, developing hardware and web pages, or learning about operating systems, compilers and networks.