Carlos López
I am a driven, thoughtful and very focused software engineer with a passion for learning along all domains while valuing the importance of teaching more people on it. I believe in learning from all that is already written while searching for what is yet to be discovered. I am keen in trying new things while not reinventing the wheel when not needed.
Projects
Now
Soul
Operating system that tries to prevent me from wasting my time. It's easy to get lost on the Internet, and before you know it, the eight hours you set aside for anything have disappeared. Focus on doing one task but doing it well and with great user experience is the main objective of this project.
Now
Elenchos
A chat app that only shows the last message of each person. It was developed with the mission of keeping the social network more intimate and personal where each sentence matters.
2016
read more
Shareable
Share your videos, photos, audios, documents, code and more with anyone in real time. This was the concept of my final degree thesis: A desktop multiplatform app that included authentication, notifications, previewing multiple file types, friend list, etc.
It was a really fun project to build as it allowed me to use some cool technologies that were coming up at the time, like React, Redux, Nodejs, Electron and Rethinkdb a realtime db that brought together the best of sql and nosql databases, sadly now discontinued.
Note that when I developed this project no other solution was mainstream enough at least in Spain at the time, nor slack, nor teams so it was the solution I came up with to solve having to email everything internally in the company I was working on. If only I had continued it..
Interests
My never-ending curiosity makes keeping this updated an arduous task but I'll try my best:
On one side I've been interested lately in companies and their founders journey, from one person bootstrapped companies to Mark Zuckerberg managing a established company trying to create a new way of interacting. If you are also interested in this things I recommend you any of Tim Ferris, Lex Fridman or Itnig(spanish) podcasts or following Codie Sanchez, Naval Ravikant, Sahil Bloom, Arvid Kahl, Ankur Warikoo and more on Twitter.
On the other side I'm tasting(and loving) wines from all around my home country(Spain) and visiting some vineyards to learn more about them and their making process.
Work experience
Digital Value 2014 - 2019 (4 years and 7 months)
Fullstack engineer
Learnings:
- · The value of having a mentor in a person's early career
- · The opportunity and the freedom to learn what you want to learn and use the tools you want to use
- · The importance of a good self-chosen schedule for your work-life balance
read more
I started in my last year of university as a full stack developer. Here I learned to apply everything I studied and discovered that the working world is far from the theory of the classes. Luckily I joined a company that gave you enough freedom to learn and experiment with the latest tools within the restrictions required by the clients and the company itself. So I had to not only train myself in the latest technologies but also be responsible for the development that I had to do from the initial phase to the launch.
All this was possible thanks to what for me was the most important lesson I learned and that is the value of mentoring. Not only did he guide me through the work I had to do and answer any questions I had, but he also instilled in me the motivation and curiosity for everything I could learn and be interested in.
With that confidence and guidance I was able to develop myself and build a number of nodejs and mongodb api's and react cms's that made me learn the importance of the choice of tools. For example, that most database schemas are relational and that using a noSQL is not going to end well. A mistake that I would later discover is common not only in the decision making positions but also in the developers themselves.
Homyspace 2019 - Now (3 years and 2 months)
Senior Fullstack engineer
Learnings:
- · Picking the right tools for the job
- · Culture means everything
- · Make, check, iterate but do it FAST
- · Be open to being wrong
read more
A new opportunity arrived for me when I was invited to work at a startup. Coming from an SME the new and shiny glow of a freshly created company was appealing enough for me to make the change. It was a shoking change indeed as I entered a place with hungry young people that believed in the project as well as in creating a culture that made working there a joy.
On the tech side we also had the same freedom I experienced in the other company that allowed us to pick the state of the art languages, frameworks and infrastructures that we were promised were the best by their hype. We loved and cooperated within the team in the learning process which made it even more fun. But soon enough we ran into a wall of technical debt which we delayed taking care of. This resulted in development delays that even meant that features that were to be implemented on a daily basis could not be implemented for months. This is unacceptable for a startup. Also it coincided with a culture problem in the tech department itself which led to its breakup and some people leaving because of it. Addresing it sooner could have made that the culture prevailed and really good people would keep working there.
A complete refactor was put on the table which I was against of because of the complexity of the infrastructure, the operations and the new solution which included a new tech that no one on the team knew. The refactor was confirmed and the team began to work on it which resulted in me realizing that I was wrong. Just as the company realized that there was a problem and the developments had to go faster I realized that sometimes the solution is to get rid of everything you have worked on so far, recognize that the decisions you made were not the best (with time you were knowing it) and that there are tools that are right for the challenges you currently face in your company. That tool was ruby on rails, not a shiny and cool new tech but a really polished one that made the developer experience a delight and helped us refactor everything in 3 months.
A lot has been learned so far and yet a lot is still to be learned.
Reading
Up until recently I didn't use to read any book. I only watched videos and documentaries, read articles and listened to some podcasts and while I think there is plenty of content in those mediums I have now discovered how much one loses if they leave books aside. You'd be surprised how much we have in common with people who lived even more than 1000 years ago. Few things can give you more value than a book for less than 15€.
"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
Charles W. Eliot
Now
- The courage to be happy by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
- The psychology of money by Morgan Hausel
Read
- Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters by Ryan Singer
- Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
- The courage to be disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
- The Mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick
- The daily stoic by Ryan Holiday
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- Zero to one by Peter Thiel
- Hanakotoba: The language of flowers by Alex Pler
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- The monk who sold his ferrari by Robin Sharma
- The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
- Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford
Unread
- Inspired by Marty Cagan
- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
- Deploy empathy by Michele Hansen
- Four thousand weeks: Time management for mortals by Oliver Burkeman
- Essentialism by Greg McKeown
- Ikigai by Francesc Miralles and Héctor García
- Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
- Deep work by Cal Newport
- Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- The Rational Optimism by Matt Ridley
- The hard things about hard things by Ben Horowitz
- Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Good to Great by Jim Collins
- Hooked by Nir Eyal
- The minismalist entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia
- What I speak about when I speak about running by Haruki Murakami
- 12 rules for life by Jordan B. Peterson
Travel
I've been lucky enough to travel to a few countries in my life that have helped me to view different perspectives and to discover new things. Viewing different cultures and lifestyles allows you to open your eyes and come back to reality when you have spent a long time surrounded by the same people or the same places(yes I'm counting the internet as well).
Have been
· Budapest, Hungary
· Paris, France
· Iceland
· London, UK
· New York-Washington, USA
· Munich, Germany
· El Cairo-Luxor-Abu Simbel, Egypt
· Amsterdam, Netherlands
· Rome-Florence-Pisa, Italy
· A lot of my home country Spain
Would love to be
· Southeast Asia(Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam)
· North-West Africa
· South France with my motorbike
· Japan