👋 Hi folks

I’m Iván (he/him), pronounced ee-bahn.

I’ve been building software for a long time — long enough to remember when “shipping” felt like the whole job. Over the years I learned that the real work isn’t just writing code. It’s making decisions you can live with. Keeping things understandable for Future You. And building teams where people can do great work without burning out.

My home base has usually been backend, but I’ve always followed the problem wherever it went: frontend, DevOps, mobile, UI/UX… not because I wanted to collect skills, but because I cared about the full product. I like systems that make sense end-to-end. I like work that’s useful, not just clever.

These days, my focus is less on “how do we implement this?” and more on “how do we build in a way that stays healthy?” I lead distributed teams, shape engineering strategy, and think a lot about architecture — not as diagrams, but as a way to protect focus, clarity, and momentum.

On the side, I’m building Avenida with former colleagues I genuinely love working with. It’s one of those rare projects where the product feels personal and the collaboration feels easy — the kind of work that reminds you why you got into tech in the first place.

I also keep an ongoing notebook of everything I wish I’d had earlier in my career: my Engineering Leadership Playbook. It’s not a manifesto — it’s an operating system. Practical frameworks for running teams, improving delivery, growing people, and protecting culture. Templates you can copy, rituals you can try, patterns you can keep.

Why I write (the human side, made practical)

I write because the hardest parts of our work rarely show up in the backlog.

Technology is the visible layer. The human layer is where things quietly break: attention, confidence, motivation, conflict, collaboration, ambiguity, the pressure to always be “on,” the feeling of never being done. I’ve lived enough of the good and the hard parts of this industry to know that you can have great engineers and still end up with a team that’s exhausted, reactive, and disconnected.

I’ve learned the hard way that sustainable teams are built on small habits. Not big transformations, not new tools — but small rhythms that protect clarity, trust, and focus over time.

A big theme in my writing is how to coexist with the reality of building software — the pace, the uncertainty, the constant change — without losing yourself (or your team) in the process. That includes mental health, sustainability, and the things we don’t always name at work but definitely feel.

I’m especially interested in teams that want to move fast without becoming brittle. In practice, that means I write about operating rhythms that reduce chaos, team health patterns you can actually apply, delivery systems that respect humans, and what happens when technology accelerates faster than people can process — especially in AI-accelerated environments.

Whenever possible, I try to turn the “human side” into tools you can use: a template, a checklist, a script for a hard conversation, a small ritual that prevents emotional debt from piling up.

Mentoring is a big part of my life too. On MentorCruise, I help engineers grow — sometimes in coding fundamentals, sometimes in leadership, sometimes in figuring out what they actually want next. I’ve also spent years building community in Asturias: I founded Elixir Asturias, co-organize FabadaConf, and I speak regularly about diversity, inclusion, and mental health in tech. Those aren’t side topics for me — they’re part of what “good engineering” means.

Outside of work, I’m usually playing guitar or behind a camera. I love going to conferences and meetups, not just to talk, but to learn — and to leave with a few ideas that genuinely change how I build.

If you want to chat, drop me an email, connect on LinkedIn, or book a mentorship session. I’d love to hear from you.