About

Juan Rodriguez Donado profile picture

I’m a software engineer from Barranquilla, Colombia, currently based in Berlin. I work across web, mobile, distributed systems, databases, and offline-first architectures.

My interest in systems began when I installed my first Linux distro, CrunchBang, was a teenager after my old Windows XP PC suffered a RAM slot failure. From that point, I spent countless hours hacking laptops and single-board computers.

I was granted a scholarship for a bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering and later another for a master’s degree. In the second year of my bachelor’s program, I was first introduced to the web. I built a PHP app over a weekend and kept learning by developing scrapers, Java & Kotlin Android apps, retro videogames, Laravel & Rails REST APIs, and machine learning tools. I landed my first job working with Node.js and React by the end of that year.

During my master’s, I conducted research in high-performance computing on a 936-core cluster with 416 GB of RAM. I applied data assimilation methods such as EnKF and 3D-Var to advance high-resolution WRF weather modeling.

I’ve had the chance to work with startups at different stages, from building MVPs to scaling systems that handle over 3.5 million daily transactions (Getir 2023).

Outside of work, I write on my blog, contribute to open source projects, practice calisthenics, advocate for self-hosted and free software, and read ocasionally.

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