I’m a software developer born and raised in La Paz, Bolivia.
I currently work for Banco Nacional de Bolivia as a “Digital Solutions Analyst”, though that’s just a fancy name for someone who works at the Innovation Center. I work on their iOS apps and I have designed security-minded protocols for some of them.
I started my university studies at Universidad Católica Boliviana in 2011. The career I was pursuing was simply “Systems Engineering”. I didn’t finish my degree there. Instead, I transferred to Universidad Privada Boliviana in late 2012 because the program was much more interesting. I finished all my courses in July 9, 2018 and I’m currently working on my thesis to get my degree in Computer Systems Engineering. In college I was involved in a few startups all related to app development in Bolivia.
I mostly write iOS apps in both Objective-C and Swift, though I adopted the latter in the first version and have been using it almost exclusively since then. I have published many apps in the App Store throughout the years, and many have come and gone. I published my first app in 2011 when I was a college freshman; it was a simple numerical base converter which I was using for my computer science classes at the time. My most popular app is Mignori, which used to be on the App Store, but I removed it to publish a better version sometime this year.
For a few years, I was involved in the iOS Jailbreak community, because doing basic reverse engineering to Apple’s apps (and other people’s apps) in order to make them behave differently was fun. I used to write tutorials for Jailbreak development in my blog. I stopped jailbreaking sometime in 2014 or 2015, so I am no longer involved with the community.
During college, I started working as a freelancer iOS developer. I was lucky, because iOS developers are a minority in Bolivia, so finding freelancing jobs was not hard. I’ve worked for various clients, most notably BZ Group, one of the biggest marketing and software development houses in the country.
I also use other technologies and languages. PHP is another language I use a lot - whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I’ll leave it up to you to decide. I have built a few Android apps in Java as well, but I was never interested in developing that skill much further beyond that. In general, I enjoy learning programming languages of all kinds and purposes, but the ones I use the most are a few - Swift, Objective-C, and a classical webstack with PHP, MySQL and Apache.