Roberto Hidalgo <un@rob.mx>

I’ve been doing software engineering for nearly two decades, and here you’ll find a summary of it, along with some of my skills. If you’re interested in a more verbose version, see rob.mx/cv.

Timeline

2021...present Staff Software Engineer at Bluecore

Bluecore provides a unified system to identify, acquire, retain and grow retail revenue through highly-personalized automated communications.

2020...2021 Senior DevOps Engineer at Hum Capital

Hum makes the process of obtaining financing for startups fast, efficient and easy.

2020 Senior DevOps Engineer at Attentive Mobile

Attentive offers a personalized mobile messaging platform that thousands of companies use to engage with their audiences.

2016...2020 Staff Infrastructure Engineer at Blink Health

Blink provides affordable and transparent access to medications for people in the United States.

2010...2016 Lead Engineer at Partido Surrealista Mexicano

The Mexican Surrealist Party was a software development agency I co-founded that worked on a variety of domains for its clients.

2001...2010 CTO at Comtelsat

Comtelsat is an international film, broadcast, and security systems integrator for the private and public sector.

Skills

For deploying software reliably

• I tame clouds, including AWS, GPC and Azure, using their own tooling as well as terraform, ansible, packer and docker.
• I pay a lot of attention to the flow of code from git, though CI/CD tooling like CircleCI, Jenkins and Github Actions, up to its deployment and testing.
• When useful, I’ll use golang, python and bash to automate workflows and think the unix philosophy is a great guide to it.
• The software I deploy becomes operable through the available information of it through logging, metrics and tracing; I’ve used new relic, honeycomb, sentry, the elk stack, splunk and datadog for that.

For building software as a team

• As a long time self-directed learner, I value sharing available context in different ways; inline documentation only goes so far, and I’ve found RFCs, talks, guides, and sharing sessions are invaluable at enable self-directed learning in others.
• Being thought of as the person to reach to when hitting a wall is what makes me feel the proudest, I love pair-debugging with folks, participating in incident retrospectives, and will happily join the on-call schedule.
• Getting up to speed with a new team is a challenge I enjoy helping with; I’ve developed and then facilitated training sessions, building tools to automate and maintain developer’s setup.
• My favorite hobby at work is to write tools that will make my team’s work easier to accomplish, but know that’s half of the work. The other half I like even better: to document them, introduce them to both codebases and my fellow teammates, and even open sourcing them!

For the web

• I write software for the web with ruby, python, javascript, php, html and css.
• I’ve learned why not to build frameworks for some of these using django, sinatra, rails, express, and react instead.
• The systems I’ve built have been backed by data stores like mysql, postgres, redis, dynamodb, bigquery, and mongodb.
• http feels like home to me, and I understand websockets, REST, tls, grpc and graphql reasonably well; I prefer curl over wget.
• Traversing the stack is easy for me, I enjoy writing UIs as much as APIs, thinking of caching, CDNs, DNS, service workers, data store querying, and everything in between.