Venelectronics is a retail store with 5 branches in Venezuela. There are many challeneges associated to the politics, taxes and laws in Venezuela, making it harder to run a retail store and spacially in the ecommerce world.

I have been in charge of the execution of small projects for the customization of their CRM software, trying to align it with the products and promotions launched by the Marketing Department and others.

Since year 2019 to 2022, I've been managing an offshore company, dedicated to software development in Dominican Republic, for a group of companies in the Internet Services business, located in New York, USA.

My main tasks are to provide the physical space, services, equipment and facilites for the operations of the developers. I also run campaigns for hiring the developers and make a first approach in order to filter according to non-technical assessments.

Working at SmartTechDo was a great experience. Basically, I provided solutions to complex problem within the ifrastruture of our clients.

I spent a lot of time reading documentation of software (open source mostly) figuring out how to improve the behavior of the platform that we were supporting.

Some of the technologies that I supported by the time was:

While I still was in Venezuela, Future Link sponsored my work permit and visa for Dominican Republic. In my short period with this company I was able to:

Aeronet is a Wireless ISP in Venezuela. They needed to optimize the available upstream Bandwidth for their customers.

Overall, upstream traffic was optimized by a 24% and the end-user experience was improved by 32%, thanks to higher download rates in average. The solution was implemented using the Squid Proxy on a server with a fine tuned FreeBSD.

BANAVIH (for its initials in spanish) is the official institution in Venezuela for housing loans and subsidy. They needed to optimize the hardware utilization in their datacenter.

A total of 4 servers were freed and repurposed, thanks to the application of the virtualization technology in development and testing servers; saving thousands of dollars in hardware adquirance. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Xen were the technologies used in this project.

CONVIASA is a venezuelan airline. The objectives of the project were the migration of email services and primary domain controller to open source solutions.

The email services was migrated from third-party provider to a self-hosted solution based on Red Hat Enterprise 5, Postfix, Dovecot and Roundcube as web interface. The PDC was implemented on Debian with Samba3 with group-based custom profiles on workstations. Both services were integrated with OpenLDAP as the backend for users identification and authentication. The airline achieved the compliment

Pyugmao is a risk manager company, providing Civil Liability Policies to their customers. They needed a centralized system to generate policies.

A web form was developed in the Perl programming language with the CGI interface and PostgreSQL for the database. The company was able to increase their salesforce and to emit more than ten times more policies monthly, compared to the months before the implementation of the solution.

Neat Systems is a development company specialized in ERP Software for hospitals and laboratories, running on the Windows platform. The BT-3000 Plus Chemistry Analyzer has a serial communication protocol via DB9 COMM Port, which makes it difficult to integrate into the TCP/IP network.

A webservice was developed, implementing the serial protocol and making it available via HTTP. The solution was written in Perl on Debian Linux, and embedded in a VirtualBox image, so it can be run inside a Windows server.

Bayco is a security solutions provider for the banking industry in Venezuela. They lost the control over a product they owned, due to some discordance with the former developers of the product. I was able to reverse-engineering the product and implement it using open source technologies. I gave them back the control over the product by writing detailed documentation about how their product works, how was developed and how can be modified.

The rewrite was made with Perl, using the framework Mojolicious, PortgreSQL and Debian Linux. A customization of the debian-installer was made in order to include the corporate image of Bayco. The functionality of the product was to take a screenshot of face, check and id document when a client goes to the bank to cash a check.

FIDES is a company providing medical services through a call center. The requirement was a setup such that if the main VoIP PBX server fails, the spare can't take more than 20 seconds for the failover.

The goal was achieved combining specialized hardware from Digium™ and replication techniques on Elastix.

inmobilia.com is a real state web portal with presence in 13 countries. The initial setup for their portal went out of capacity when they reached 4 hits per second. I designed for them a mixed cluster with virtual and bare metal servers, with defined roles as loadbalancers, backends and databases. I also leaded the development team into the Git Branching Model workflow, documented in this article by Vincent Driessen. Finally, I configured an Amazon S3 bucket for the bank of images of the portal (about 160 GB by that time) and helped to integrate the storage service in the portal.

The performance increased drastically, holding loads of above 30 requests per second with no significant impact on the servers, whose could handle up to 5 times such load without penalties. This implementation is saving money by using virtual servers for most of the hosts and not requiring huge amounts of additional storage for backups.

The development team of inmobilia.com tried to implement the versioning feature from S3 service. However, they made a mistake and sent all their images to Glacier, where they are not available online. Even with paid support from AWS, they were unable to recover the files.

Using the API from AWS S3 I wrote I script in Perl making parallel request, which helped to recover the files 16 times faster than the time required if we used the methods suggested by AWS support. You can take a look at the script at https://github.com/granalberto/s3mu.