About

I started working at eighteen, in a workshop, with my hands.

For a while that was the entire plan. I took a vocational degree in automotive technology, worked on cars, then on Barcelona's street-cleaning fleet, then on refrigeration units for refrigerated trucks. Then I enrolled at university and did both at once for four years: workshop in the morning, lectures in the afternoon, and whatever was left of the day for studying. I came out of it with the best academic record of my year, which I am mentioning exactly once, here, because the sentence takes about two seconds to read and the thing itself took four years.

There is a joke buried in all that which I did not plan. I spent a year as a refrigeration mechanic, servicing compressors and evaporators on trucks. Almost twenty years later I am the engineer responsible for the electronics of a line of refrigerators. I would love to claim that was a strategy. It was not.

What did carry across is the part that has nothing to do with refrigeration: I am comfortable with the physical object. I will happily modify a market appliance to fit my own electronics into it, build a rig with real loads and sensors, or open something up rather than argue about what it might be doing.

There is a pattern to how I spend my time off and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I like systems I can measure and adjust.

Cosmo. He is a rescue, currently eight months old, a mix of bodeguero and dachshund in harlequin black and white, and he came home at two months. He has quietly reorganized my weekends around beaches, dog parks, and routes I would never otherwise have walked, and I read a great deal more about canine training and behavior than anybody strictly needs to.

Cooking, approached as a discipline rather than a hobby: temperatures, times, textures, and equipment. It is not a coincidence that I work on ovens, and it is genuinely useful to have cooked on the thing you are writing the control algorithm for.

Inline skating, where I have somehow ended up tuning boot fit, insoles, and wheel setup with the same energy I put into a calibration session at work. The equipment is a system too.

Electronics that never becomes a product, which is the one that keeps the job feeling like the hobby it started as: microcontrollers on a desk, connected things around the house, and the occasional vehicle fault I would rather diagnose myself than describe to somebody else.

This site was built by Bits&Roses, a side project I co-founded in 2012.

Around eight websites in fourteen years, on commission, with long quiet stretches in between. It is not a parallel career and I am not selling myself as a web developer: it is where the part of me that likes building things gets to build something that is not embedded, in weeks rather than years. Every so often that is exactly what I need.