I’ve been building for the web for more than 25 years. First with PHP, and since 2013 with Ruby on Rails.
I care about software design, clean code and maintainable solutions that deliver real business value. Remote since 2014: distributed teams, asynchronous collaboration. I’ve taught Rails on LinkedIn Learning (5,900+ enrollments) and write about software design on DevelClan.
*nowHEAD → mainCareer break: studying software design full-time and writing about it on DevelClan.
*2024Published “Hands-On Introduction: Ruby on Rails” on LinkedIn Learning.
*2023Senior engineer on CloudStore, a white-label e-commerce platform with dynamic pricing for ski resorts: took over from a five-person team as its sole engineer, migrated live payments with zero downtime and designed an accounts API.
*2023Published “Hotwire: Reactive Ruby on Rails Applications” on LinkedIn Learning.
*2022Built GreenMarket.net, a gardening marketplace, from scratch, and maintained and extended Verkami.com, a creative crowdfunding platform.
*2022Published my first LinkedIn Learning course: “Ruby on Rails: Debugging”.
*2015Senior engineer on HiveHome.com, British Gas’s smart-home store: maintained a modular Rails codebase and helped replace the Spree e-commerce engine with custom code.
*2014Went remote, building Rails apps for a London agency: a brainstorming platform and the API for the Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 site.
*2013Poured everything I knew about Symfony 2 into a Udemy course, then left PHP for Ruby on Rails.
*2008The Symfony years: classifieds and e-commerce sites, often as the only developer.
*2006Technical lead at a Barcelona start-up: built Tree-Nation.com, an eco social network, from scratch, then grew and led a team of three. PHP, MySQL, Linux.
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* |2005Hired as a UNIX systems administrator, straight in as a level-3 technician. Reverted after a week: I was a developer.
| *2005university:Graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Barcelona.
| *2005mac:First laptop: an Apple iBook G4 running Mac OS X Tiger. The first step on a long road to an all-Mac setup.
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*2001Full-time trainer while studying at university: 500+ hours of company courses, mostly UNIX and Linux, plus Java and web development.
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| *2001university:Started Computer Engineering at the University of Barcelona.
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*2000Merged into my first job in October, thanks to a recommendation from someone I met on #php: a train-management web app for FGC, a Catalan railway, in ASP. On day one a stack of notes landed on my desk: I was teaching a JavaScript course the following week.
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* |2000Hired to program COBOL on AS/400 systems. Reverted after a few days: it wasn't my path.
| *1998irc:Started building websites in PHP and hanging out in #php on IRC-Hispano.
| *1998linux:First Linux: Red Hat 5.0, from a magazine CD, installed next to Windows to see what it could do.
| *1998npi:NPI #3: replaced NeoBook with my own engine, written in C for MS-DOS. Shipped on the cover CD of PCManía 70, the Spanish computer magazine.
| *1998freelance:First client: a billing app in C for the local mechanic. Without a real database it grew too complex, and I had to abandon it. Lesson learned.
| *1997npi:NPI #1: a disk magazine made with classmates in NeoBook. I wrote about computers and music. Published on the cover CD of PCManía 61; #2 followed in PCManía 66.
| *1996demoscene:Fell for the demoscene, in the days of Spanish group Iguana and their demo Despair. What those people squeezed out of assembly is what got me building things.
| *1996music:Discovered Fast Tracker II and started composing my first music on the computer.
| *1996hardware:Built my first PC from parts, a Pentium 133, and from then on built every one myself. Soon I was everyone’s tech support.
| *1995win95:Tried to install Windows 95 by copying a friend’s folders onto my new Pentium 90. It didn’t boot, and that’s how I learned how an operating system really gets installed.
| *1995academy:Diploma from my neighbourhood computer academy: MS-DOS 6.2, WordPerfect 5.1, dBase III Plus and Lotus 1-2-3. Years earlier, BASIC hadn’t won me over.
| *1994books:Learned the basics of Pascal, then C.
| *1994pcmania:Read PCManía, a Spanish computer magazine, cover to cover every month. That’s where I learned hardware and computer architecture.
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*1993Initial commit: my first PC, an IBM PS/1 with a 386SX at 25 MHz, MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1.
