Who is me?

For those who doesn't know me, my name is Pablo Álvarez de Sotomayor Posadillo, although I'm also known as Ritho, mainly because Pablo is a pretty common name in Spain and it's not strange to be more than one Pablo in a small group (I've actually been in a group where half of the people were called Pablo).

Although I've born in Sevilla (Spain), I've lived most of my life in Córdoba (Spain), so I consider myself from Córdoba. I have a Degree (three years) in Computer Science from the University of Córdoba, and I've almost finished my Barchelor Degree (two additional years) in Computer Science in Granada, and I've been working as a developer since 2007.

In my years of experience I've done a little bit of everything, infrastructure, backend development, frontend development and Android development, but most of my carreer I've been a backend developer with a good understanding on the infrastructure side.

I've always been a big fan of Free Software and GNU/Linux (I've actually been using just GNU/Linux in all my computers since 2001, when the installation process wasn't so easy), so you won't see me using Windows :).

On the development side, I've use a lot of programming languages (C, PHP, Java, Python, Perl, Golang, Elixir, ...), but probably the two languages I like the most (for now) is C and Golang, although I think Elixir is quite interesting too (I need to play with it a bit more to add it to the list). I've also been following the Clean Code and the Clean Architecture principles for quite some time, adding unit tests to my code, separating the different concerns, ...

On the infrastructure side, I've been experimenting with virtual environments for some time (Linux VServer around 2008, Xen and VSphere, AWS, GCloud, Kubernetes, Docker-compose, ...), so, although I don't consider myself an expert, I know the main concepts of virtualization for some time :). In that time I've done from client web sites isolation to continuous deployment on Kubernetes, passing through migrating from one virtualization system to another, managing autoscalling with scripts and configurations, building and deploying using different pipelines (Jenkins, Spinnaker, Travis, GoCD, ArgoCD, ...) into different clouds, managing resources with Terraform, ...

Because of my experience, I've been also backend tech lead and team lead, which, since I'm an introvert (no surprise, being a backend developer), it doesn't come natural to me, so I've learn a lot about communication, trying to facilitate the work of my colleagues, motivate the team to follow good practices, evolving the architecture, setting expectatives and trying to get a good balance between releasing new functionalities and doing the needed refactors so the delivery speed nor the code quality decay.

On a more personal level, apart from computers (obviously), I enjoy travelling (I've actually been living on Mexico for almost 4 years), reading, a good beer and the nature in general (I've been 8 years in the Boys Scout and now I share a garden with some friends where we plant vegetables for self consume). I also have a cat, so I like animals too :).