I LIKE UNDERSTANDING HOW THINGS WORK
Not just the code, but the whole thing: what the system is trying to achieve, what constraints it has, where the pieces connect, and what happens when something inevitably goes wrong.
I'm José María, and I've spent most of my career building and evolving software systems in very different environments.
THE ENVIRONMENTS CHANGED. THE PROBLEM DIDN'T
I've worked on backend platforms, APIs, distributed processing systems and real-time data.
I've also worked much closer to the physical world: industrial edge systems running on constrained hardware, communicating through different industrial protocols and deployed at customer sites.
Those environments have very different constraints. But they share something important.
There is usually more complexity than can be understood by looking at one piece of the system at a time.
THAT'S WHERE I LIKE TO WORK
I enjoy figuring out how the pieces actually fit together.
Where the boundaries should be. Which constraints are real. What needs to happen in real time. What happens when something fails. Which abstractions are useful and which ones are just adding another layer of complexity.
That often means going deeper than the initial problem suggests.
A performance problem might actually be a data-model problem. A scaling problem might actually be a workload-management problem. A messy codebase might actually be suffering from unclear boundaries.
I like finding the problem underneath the problem.
ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT LEAVING ENGINEERING BEHIND
Over time, my work moved from implementing individual services to taking more responsibility for how larger systems fit together.
I've designed systems from scratch, evolved existing architectures, investigated difficult performance problems, changed database models, worked with constrained hardware and integrated systems that don't behave like ordinary software.
I've also led small engineering teams and worked closely with other engineers to turn ambiguous problems into something concrete enough to build.
I still write code.
For me, architecture is about making better engineering decisions before — and while — the code is being written.
WHAT KEEPS ME INTERESTED
I like learning how unfamiliar systems work.
Understanding something I didn't build. Finding the assumption nobody questioned. Tracing a problem through several layers until the real cause becomes visible.
And then making the whole thing a little simpler than it was before.