As you may imagine, my name is Diego Valcarce, I am a “data engineer”, but I also do a lot of stuff totally uncorrelated. At the moment of writing I live in a medium sized city in Spain, called A Coruña, a city I really love and that has a lot of things that makes it really special, for example:
- It has the oldest, yet running lighthouse in the world, the “Torre de Hércules”. It has just around two thousand years.
- We also have the longest see walk in Europe, with nothing but 12 km.
- Probably the best looking portrait of the city are the “Galerías”:
- Is home to some of the biggest companies in the world, or at least in Spain, such as Inditex, and also the home to one of the oldest banks in Europe (Abanca).
whoami
As for myself, I am interested mainly in computers and I recently discovered my joy for electronics. I know a bit about databases and linux and like developing software, mainly at low level, but I work with whatever you throw at me. Currently, I am the VP of Engineering in a company called Innogando SL (titulitis, but I work my ass off) as a bit of everything, from firmware to data analysis. You can find a bit more of my work experience at the logs of my life.
dmesg
Work experience
VP of Engineering @ Innogando SL
I started as a Data Scientist February 2023 and I currently hold the VP of Engineering position, due the hard work and the big achivements we have accomplished as the team we are.
Some of this wins were:
- We had several problems of scalability due to a bad design of the database, so we decided to migrate everything to the based PostgreSQL, “The World’s Most Advanced Open Source Relational Database”. If you do not know yet, I am a fanatic of PostgreSQL.
- We had some problems, in terms of costs, with what was our current LoRa gateway provider, so we have decided to create our own one. I wrote the firmware LOL.
Data Science intern @ Deus Iberia SL
I did my curriculum practicum in a Dutch company called Deus, working primarly with OCR. I did not enjoy much the practicum, but I think I learned a lot about how bad companies can work and how companies should be run (I really appreciated how they worked).
Research positions @ UDC
Since I started in collage, I worked for the university (Universidad de A Coruña), in multiple projects and disciplines. I can talk very well about some of my mentors like Marcos Gestal and Alejandro Puente Castro. Some of the projects I was envolved in:
- A radon prediction algorithm, for our university (which had and has problems with it). Resulted in a paper and a open source project.
- A Low Cost (Raspberry-based) Particle Velocimetry library (lcpv).
Education
I mainly have a BSc in Data Science and Engineering @ UDC. The university lacks formal education so I am not really proud of what I have been tought there, but there were some good teachers that worth to be mentioned, but that’s a story for other day.