Published on Wed Aug 04 2021
Written by Nacho Consolani
So, this is the first post of this blog/portfolio, the initial commit.
There will be few or no mentions to pure techy subjects, but a short introduction to myself and to the
people that sorrounds me, whom will be also part of this blog for sure.
I am Juan Ignacio Consolani, friends call me Nacho, I am 28 years old and I live in Carlos Casares, a small town in the NorthWest of Buenos Aires province, Argentina.
I grew up playing with electricity, homemade gunpowder, airplanes, and a gang of really good friends around. Technology has been always a main subject in my lifepath, since I have a techy and nerd father who was always playing with cutting edge technology gadgets.
I’ve always loved music and playing music, specially guitar. I founded my own little start-up building and selling Guitar Effects Pedals and this experience gave me a first approach to software development, as I had to program some Atmel AVR chips.
At that time (2018-2019) I also played a bit with Arduino and got to really like the digital world, specially the fact of being able to talk to the machine in its language and automate stuff.
Although my first experience with software development was strongly related to hardware and IoT, I rapidly got involved in some multipurpose languages like Python, learning the basics of data flow control structures, scripting and linux environment, with the help of my brother Mau and Guido, with whom I am currently working.
At the end of 2019, my close friend Axel and I, started learning JavaScript. We did everything you should not do when learning a new language. The goal was to refactor an entire web app to a mobile app. We started with Cordova (PhoneGap), knowing almost nothing about Web technologies. Soon we found a library that should ease the job a lot, React Native… Or at least that’s what we thought at the moment.
So we learnt JavaScript at the same time we were applying it within a framework, a big no-no for any learning path. In spite of all the dirty code and frustrations, we found our way out of it and became friendly with concepts as, hosting, servers, ssh, http, databases, authentication, statefull apps, UI/UX, testing, CI/CD, command line interfaces, code versioning, cloud services, PaaS, SaaS and much more stuff I had never heard of before.
2020 ☣ As the sars-cov-2 arised, everyone’s routine became hell after some weeks of aparently temporary quarantine. We took advantage of the spare time to keep on learning, and built up a junior dev team with my friends Axel, Angus and my brother Mau. In the term of a pair of months we built a simple but wonderfull App in two different platforms. The web version was developed with Python/Flask and Bootstrap, and the mobile version with Expo, a powerfull framework wrapping React Native that makes all the mobile development experience faster and easier, specially for beginners.
The webapp was deployed to Heroku, a cloud application platform that enables developers to build, run, and operate applications entirely in the cloud.
For this project we were guided by our Scrum Guru, Axel Diaz. We worked with some of the Agile guidelines and not only it improved the development experience quality but also the final mvp quality.
We went through a Product Discovery and Story Mapping process which prepared us really well for all the way we had ahead.
For easing these processes, we helped ourself with tools like Trello and Miro. Trello is an online platform with a TO-DO board oriented interface which can easily adapt to a framework like Kanban or Scrum. Miro is an online tool to help teams take down to earth ideas on a visual canvas, which also adapts to all kinds and forms of boards and diagrams. It also has a huge list of pre-designed templates that are a great start point.
As the time went by, we felt very comfortable with the dynamic of the team a created our own team Alias: 4HappyDevs
In 2020 I enrolled in a Bachelor’s degree in CS at Universidad Nacional de La Plata. I got off to a good start but it soon got tough as I got my first job. In the meantime, I learnt some basics on Data Structures and Algorithms, Programming Paradigms and some basic concepts of Computer’s architecture.
After these first experiences mentioned above and some other little projects I got my first job in the industry as a junior fullstack developer, which actually I dont even know what the f**k it really means yet.
The company is a multinational called Everis, which now belongs to NTT Data, and the position involved developing a responsive, mobile-first webapp in a React, along with a huge layer of microservices writen in Node and hosted in an OpenShift Cluster, for a big Telco. Really cool stuff, and cutting edge technology. We were organized in squads, small teams made up of 4-5 fullstack developers, a Scrum Master and a Product Owner.
The experience was really nice and I made a bunch of really good mates with whom I’m currently in touch.
At the moment I’m working at StoryDots as a junior web developer. StoryDots is a product based startup that integrates with e-commerce sites, offering online stores the possibility for their customers to attach a virtual greeting to their purchase.
At StoryDots we work with a topnotch tech stack based on serverless AWS infrastructure. We also work with Agile methodologies and the working enviroment is awesome. We are a very small team of great professionals, but specially great persons.