About Me - Blog

Hello dear reader :wave:

Welcome to my home on the Internet.
My name is Alex Castaño and this is my personal blog.

About me

I’m a Spanish guy who writes better code than English, so please, excuse me for any mistakes you can find in this blog — or better, let me a comment so I’ll fix it.

I’m 28 years old and I live in Barcelona. I love to joke, good tapas and the siesta, probably because I was born in the lovely city of Sevilla.

I’m passionate about programming, and more specifically about creating helpful software for people in all its dimensions: design, user experience, coding, business, marketing… I’m also a tireless learner and a kind of bootstrapper.

In addition to computers, I also enjoy football, economics, skating, kite surf, sports, reading, watching series, traveling, music… You know, typical stuff!

About the blog

My motivation for this micro space in the WWW is to return a little of the knowledge I acquired from the Internet, especially from the Free/Open Software community.

This is a mostly technical blog with posts about programming, Linux, deployments, servers, vim, web, etc. I like sharing what I’ve learned in the day, giving sometimes, a strong opinion about it — but I reserve my right to change my mind at any time :smile:

I also publish about the side projects I’m working on, personal experiences and business stuff. Hopefully, it will be useful for people creating their own projects as well.

Current work

Right now, my main goal is to create a profitable business by myself. The last one is Deverify, a tool to test developers before hiring them.

At the same time, I work as an independent consultant for complex problems in Ruby, including application design, performance issues, architecture, etc. I also do small or medium projects for clients when full dedication is not a requirement.

If you think I’d be the ideal person for your project, please send me an email to: alexcastanodev (at) gmail (dot) com

Background

I started coding at the age of 14. I spent my free time in High School learning C & C++, creating amateur games, learning the command line and compiling kernels.

I studied Computer Engineering at Seville University, where I also worked on its own open source solution to remotely restore OS in the University’s computers.

Very soon I created my own company. I built projects for clients and they usually paid me. But after years of doing consulting and a failed own project, I closed my 9 people company. We hadn’t interesting projects, the money was very unstable, and the stress was constant. So I realized I needed a change.

I moved to Ireland to learn some English. I worked for a year at the lovely OnePageCRM startup. There I learned a lot of things — the most of them not technical — to success with your own project.

Later I went to Barcelona with better food and much better weather. I worked at FCM France & Switzerland, a big company but with a small and friendly development team.

When I felt I was ready, I quit starting my own business again. Now I’m trying to get Deverify working and doing some consulting to pay the bills.

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