| juanibiapina@gmail.com |
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| Berlin, Germany |
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I have a Computer Science background and 14 years of experience developing software professionally. I have worked in many different layers of software development, including backend, frontend, mobile and infrastructure, with focus on backend. I advocate code quality and continuous delivery. Tests are part of my development practices, along with TDD and refactoring. I’m confident working with agile practices that enable fast delivery in small increments. I also have experience designing distributed services, microservices and REST APIs. I'm a big fan of tooling and observability.
I like environments that support growth, working along with smart, respectful and open-minded people who care about their systems, tools and code.
I love to code! I'm a NixOS, terminal and neovim user. I often learn new programming languages, frameworks and technologies. I have worked professionally with Java, Javascript, Typescript, Ruby and Go, but have also experimented with SML, Python, Haskell, Scala, Rust, Racket, Bash, Clojure, IO, and many others. I designed my own toy language, a package manager for Bash and an organizer for command line scripts that I use as part of my 12 years old dotfiles. I try to keep at least one active coding side project. You can find more details about personal projects, passions and open source on my Github Profile and my blog.
I’m also a game, music and climbing enthusiast.
August 2017 - present
As a Principal at Babbel, I work in the Content Platform team, developing the learning content CMS and related content distribution APIs. We design cross-team architecture, striving for small deliverables that bring value to users and allow teams to achieve their goals and work independently. This is mostly remote work, but we like to meet once per week.
Accomplishments:
- Content Pipeline: Designed an integration between Babbel's CMS and Contentful, enabling fast creation of content for new learning experiences. This system now holds content for more than 20 learning experiences, fulfilling the company goal of experimenting with new forms of learning. Teams can autonomously create new types through Pull Requests. All content is Git versioned and immutable.
- Content Deployment: Led a multi-year project to enable content editors to deploy content. Through a series of modeling changes, API improvements, monitoring, data migrations, test improvements, education and even a Slack bot, Babbel went from one painful content deployment per quarter to several uneventful content deployments per week.
- Content Modeling: Designed an extensible new data model for current and future Babbel content, inspired by NixOS and served through a GraphQL API. The new model is backwards compatible but also enables new use cases involving personalization and AI integration.
- Content APIs: Designed RESTful content APIs for current and future company initiatives, focusing on performance and cacheability.
- Workshops: Organized internal presentations and workshops about Babbel's content domain and architecture, empowering other teams and content creators.
- API Gateway tooling: Improved build times (from 15m to 5m) and
tooling for Babbel's main API Gateway, shared between teams. Engineers can
simply run
makeand all checks run locally using Docker with zero setup required. The same setup runs on CI. - Engineer-friendly Documentation: Started a documentation initiative to create engineer-friendly documentation in repositories. Many teams have adopted this practice and maintain Git versioned documentation.
- User vocabulary migration: Migrated all user vocabulary from MySql to DynamoDB. It went from 7 unmaintainable, untested joins, to a performant and scalable single table design.
- Service extraction: Actively drove or participated in many service extractions from the Rails monolith, including user vocabulary, content, authorization, b2b, accounts and user progress services.
- API Tests: Wrote a suite of API Integration tests (mostly for myself, at the beginning). It has grown and is now a valuable tool used by many teams to find regressions.
- Mentoring: Mentored junior, professional and senior engineers, directly supporting their growth to higher roles, including several promotions to Principal.
- Advice and support: Teams contact me on a weekly basis to discuss system design. Babbel already includes observability and automated infrastructure by default, so I often advise about sound domain entities with clear nomenclature, well defined system boundaries and responsibilities, small deliverables, and then small deliverables a few more times because the project only starts once it's in production.
- Principal Role: I was the first engineer to be promoted to Principal. I helped define the role and its responsibilities drawing from my own experience temporarily moving between teams.
Technologies:
- Ruby, Typescript, Go
- Rails, React
- Terraform
- AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, Cloudwatch and many other services
- Datadog, Rollbar
Feb 2017 - August 2017
I joined a team of full-stack engineers at Movinga and immediately started working on a microservice and its three client applications. I was also responsible for starting a couple of frontend applications from scratch. Later we extracted a # microservice from the main legacy code in order to improve deployment times, frequency (from once every two weeks to 10 times a day) and provide better insights about our prices.
Technologies:
- Ruby, Javascript
- Grape, React, Redux and other supporting libraries for both frontend and backend
- AWS, Docker
May 2015 - Jan 2017
I joined Globo.com to work on the web media platform team. Globo is the biggest television channel in Brazil. As part of its technology team, we were responsible for ingesting raw television content videos and encoding them for online streaming. We worked on a system that provided both an UI and an API for uploading videos and metadata. This system was distributed in more than 50 locations across Brazil, gathering and processing videos from all partners. We processed more than 2.5TB of videos on a weekly basis, accounting for more than a thousand hours of content.
Accomplishments:
- Designed a content protection microservice that integrates with 3 third party APIs
- Participated on hiring interviews for most people hired in the Porto Alegre office
- Started an observability initiative to gather video encoding metrics and better understand our system
- Helped shape the office culture
- Mentored less experienced engineers
Technologies:
- Ruby, Javascript and Coffeescript
- Rails and Backbone
- Ffmpeg and x264
- Mongo and Redis
November 2014 - April 2015 (6 months)
We developed an anonymous social network. The whole team worked with all parts of the development, so I had the opportunity to work with a Go backend hosted on Google App Engine, an Android and an iOS application. All of these technologies were new to me.
Accomplishments:
- Shipped a huge amount of features in very little time due to our experimental nature
- Created a pipeline for building and deploying android and iOS apps to their respective stores, improving the testing and release cycles
- Created a camera for Android that worked on the new screen sizes being released at the time.
- Worked daily with unknown technologies and new challenges
Technologies:
- Go on Google App Engine
- Javascript with Angular
- Android with Java
- iOS with Objective C
March 2013 - November 2014 (1 year 9 months)
We developed a single page application for a remote client in New York. I was hired not only because I knew some of the technologies involved but also because I was willing to learn the ones I didn't know. This was a project that could change very fast.
Accomplishments:
- Automated the deployment process and reduced the total time from 2 hours down to 160 seconds.
- Helped migrate a legacy application from Grails to Rails
- Experimented with virtual machines, docker and several deployment strategies
Technologies:
- Ruby, Javascript, Coffeescript
- Rails, Knockout.js
- Groovy with Grails
- Puppet, Chef
- Mongo, Postgres, Redis, Solr
- VirtualBox, Docker
- Nginx
July 2012 - February 2013 (8 months)
We developed systems for startups. It was my first experience with Rails, but also included frontend development. Since each engineer was responsible for managing a whole project, our responsibilities involved coding, creating interfaces, thinking about user experience, negotiating with clients, managing infrastructure and deployment, etc.
I was one of the first people to be hired on our branch of the company, so I had the opportunity to help build the culture we wanted. I learned a lot from the experience and it helped shape some of my future career goals.
Accomplishments:
- Migrated an application from rails 2 to rails 4
- Helped shape the office culture
- Developed a project from conception to delivery
Technologies:
- Ruby, Javascript
- Postgres
January 2011 - June 2012 (1 year 6 months)
Consisted mainly of consulting and web development for the retail industry, with daily client facing situations. I worked mostly on maintaining and developing new features for a large legacy Java code base. Teams were distributed across Brazil, India and the US.
This was my first contact with agile practices. I have learned much from it, including the importance of pair programming, TDD and Continuous Integration. I had a mentor that helped me build most of my ideas about development.
Accomplishments:
- Started an initiative to improve development and feedback cycles
- Introduced Javascript unit tests into the project
- Started a culture of looking into build status
- Extended the development tools, greatly improving development speed and team motivation
- Acquired the trust of some of the clients, making our work much easier
- Participated on ThoughtWorks University, which changed my life
- Started learning about interviewing candidates
Technologies:
- Java and Spring
- Javascript
- Ruby for integration tests
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, 2004 - 2007
- Portuguese (Native)
- English (Fluent)