Hey, hi there! I’m Juan, a software engineer based in Santa Cruz, CA.
I write about…
Random thoughts based on current, past, or future (fictional/non-fictional) events or experiences.
Travel, places where I have been or I’d like to explore. I live in Santa Cruz, California, so there is a high chance that I write about my favorite spots here in this town!
You read that I am a software engineer, however, I might not write much about it at the beginning.
Last but not least, this is a multilingual personal blog, therefore, I write content in other languages as well, and you will see some posts written in more than one tongue.
My journey (so far…)
I was born in southern Spain, in a town named Cádiz, and raised in San Fernando (which is just 7km from Cádiz.) San Fernando is a coastal/beach town, in fact, it is an island! I spent most of my childhood going to the beach with my family and friends. “The Island”, which many people from San Fernando refer to as this city, has a very important role in Spanish history and you can read more about it on this site.
I did all my initial studies in my hometown. I say “initial studies” because I chose a path of continuous learning. Once I finished my software engineering undergraduate degree, I moved to Barcelona. There I found my first 2 jobs as a software engineer. The first one was about an e-commerce agency. My position was about setting up WordPress for clients and customizing CSS templates. The second job was about a company providing analytics services. There I was working on pulling data from multiple sources to aggregate them into coherent dashboards for our clients.
I had a great time in Barcelona and feel I greatly grew in my personal and professional areas. After three years, I thought, it was time for a new challenge. So, in July 2013, I moved to London, UK.
I was excited to start from scratch in a new country! Also, it was my first time living abroad. It took me a month to land my first job at a digital agency company. I was a technical support/software engineer. Most of the time my role was to fix bugs or implement small features on our client’s websites, which we had developed with our proprietary website builder (something similar to WordPress.) That job was an excellent opportunity to be introduced to proper British culture (and even today I still have a bit of a British accent.)
A year later, I got a call from a head hunter about a new job opportunity at Dailymotion (The French tech web ‘nugget’ or “pépite technologique du Web”), a video hosting and sharing platform, as a backend software engineer. I joined Dailymotion in August 2014 at their London headquarters located in Shoreditch. 85-90% of the workforce at Dailymotion are French, so it was the right environment to brush up on my french! I had the chance to travel many times to Paris, France, to meet my coworkers, eat some croissants, enjoy a delicious board of cheese and charcuterie, and have some Apéro! La vie à Paris ç’est vraiment magnifique!
I enjoyed the London life for about three years. Dailymotion had offices in New York City, US, which is one of the cities that I dreamt of living in when I was a kid. And that dream came true! In November 2016, I moved to New York. I was so pumped! I felt right away that it was the place I should be, and somehow already familiar in the new city. Nevertheless, I loved discovering, experiencing, and observing all the quirks that New York City was unfolding to me. A potpourri of many different cultures coliving together.
I lived in Brooklyn. Not far from Manhattan, close enough to commute for work in about 45 min, join happy hours and late night hangouts without worrying too much about my way back home. That was what my weekdays looked like for the most part. On the weekends, I spent most of the time exploring Brooklyn, where I met my wife. I must say, we were roommates first. We lived in a shared classic brownstone building. A few months later after she moved in, we started to date. We both have many similar interests culturally and in terms of lifestyle. Then, a year later, we got married in Prospect Park on May 31, 2021.
One of the many things I have in common with my wife is surfing! We love surfing. The first time I surfed in New York was when she took me to her local beach break in Long Beach. That was quite a long trip to get there from Fort Greene. We had a plan to change that. Move to California! Since we got married, we put a day in our calendar for our New York City farewell and set the start of our cross country road trip to Santa Cruz, California, on August 25, 2022.
I grew a lot during the time that I worked at Dailmoytion in New York City. I designed backend services and architected their integration with larger systems. I became a manteiner of their public facing API and was responsible for the microservices sitting in between our front-end applications and our data wharehouse. During that time I became a senior software engineer. After a solid 8 years of work at Dailymotion, I decided that it was about time to seek for a new challenge. Also, we were moving to Cailfornia, so I figured that I wanted to start fresh on both aspects: personally and professionally.
I interviewed with many companies but it was one that standed out providing a great new opportunity and a perfect cultural fit. That company was Flipboard! I joined Flipboard on April 18, 2022 as a data engineer, full remote, in New York City, four months before moving to California. It was my first time covering a data engineering position, so I was truly excited about this opportunity to expand my technological breadth. Two weeks before my start date, I brushed up my databases and SQL knowledge, researched some of the common tooling, and studied about data pipelines and best practices. One of the best things to be a software engineer at Flipboard is the “startup” feeling and openness to welcome every engineer to contribute to any project! People at Flipboard have an incredible collaborative and growth mindset.
We started our cross country road trip to Santa Cruz, California, on August 25, 2022. My wife and I took it easy, we had no rush. We planned the move in three main parts:
- One week to reach Boulder, Colorado.
- Chill for two weeks in Boulder.
- One week to reach Santa Cruz, California.
We made it to Santa Cruz on September 23rd. As of June 2024, it’s been two years that we are living in Santa Cruz.
Reach me out!
If you’d like to chat or contact me, don’t hesitate to drop me an email at heya@jcornejo.com