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 coding began when, as a teenager, I installed CrunchBang, after my old Windows XP PC suffered a RAM slot failure. From that point on, 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 Data Assimilation. In the second year of my bachelor’s program, I built my first web app (with PHP and Boostrap) over a weekend. I kept learning about software development by crafting scrapers in Ruby, building Java and Kotlin mobile apps, making retro videogames in Javascript, creating Laravel and Rails REST APIs, and training machine learning CNN models. 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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