About

If you’re here, you probably want to know a bit more about The Crab’s Nest and it’s author, so let’s go over both of them shortly.

The Nest

The Crab’s Nest was born as yet another tech blog where I plan to dump all things I find interesting and worth sharing about both my work experience, the stuff I read in my free time and maybe even some algorithm problem solving here and there, when I feel like LeetCoding. I would expect this to eventually grow into a place where you might find some non-tech posts too; I’m a quite curious person and find many (many, many) topics interesting. Hopefully, what tickles my mind will also be of interest to you.

The Crab

Hey! I’m Rodri and I’m a Software Engineer, free-time guitarist, boxing enthusiast and very amateur footballer (this football ⚽️) who enjoys learning about history, how things work, why we do and think the things we do and think and facts no one needs to know but that will come to my mind after a couple of beers.

Not too many (I hope this ages well) years ago I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I lived for 24 years and became a Software Engineer at the University of Buenos Aires (which translating to the EU and US system is a bachelor’s in CS and a master’s in Software Engineering Management). After getting my degree, I flew to (not-so) sunny Amsterdam, where I’ve been living since.

As I always say, I consider myself a software engineer, not a backend engineer nor a Java or Python engineer, BUT (and might be a big but), since I started working back in January 2018 at Despegar.com, I’ve been doing mostly backend work in both Java and Python.

The Now

Currently I’m working as a Platform Engineer at Dexter Energy, where we’re trying to accelerate the energy transition by helping companies generate more profit with their renewable energy assets. More specifically, my team is in charge of the building platform that connects customers with our Machine Learning models, through which we ingest the required data to create forecasts for our customers and serve said forecasts.

The Path

Since that hot day of January 2018 I’ve worked in different industries, doing different things:

First I was part of the team in charge of the first backend layer of Despegar.com’s check-out platform. Among the many things we did, we were in charge of orchestrating the flow for booking a trip; from determining the data needed for a booking, to making reservations, to collecting the money. Towards the end of my career in the company, I was responsible of designing the external API of the check-out for third-parties who used Despegar’s catalog in their own site.

After two and a half years there I embarked on a journey to the city of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where I worked for a year at Picnic, a digital supermarket. There I was a backend engineer in the team in charge of developing a system to control an automated warehouse; one with many kilometers of conveyor, automatic lifts and some fancy robots.

After a brief six months stay in Booking.com, where I worked building and maintaining services for cross selling products (“Hey! If you’re going to Mallorca you might want a car!”), I moved to the wonderful Secfi.

I was a Senior Software Engineer at Secfi for over a year and a half, until the (very) rough start up life made us part ways. There, I focused mostly on the development of a set of tools that help people who owns private equity understand their financial situation in a more holistic way, allowing them to connect both their public assets (like stocks) and their private equity and understand their evolution with time and how they are connected.