Profile
Alfonso Suarez
Software Engineer

Biography
I'm Alfonso, a non-award-winning software engineer and independent mad scientist based in Venezuela.
Services
Web Development
Data Integrations
Cloud Infrastructure
Stats
Years of
experience5
Freelance
hourly rate$35
Working
since2020
Skills
Languages
Webapps
Databases
Envs
Platforms
Collab
Distributed Systems
Since early in my career, I've built products as distributed applications running in the cloud and on local environments — from microservices to smartly distributed monoliths and third-party dependencies.
I know how to deal with bottlenecks and limitations, especially on hardware-constrained environments with low-connectivity issues.
App Integrations
For the last few years, one of my core jobs has been integrating data and logic across third-party applications and proprietary software, so the outcome feels seamless between two different products.
I've built many integrations with popular business solutions for e-commerce, payment systems and national invoicing.
Data Pipelines
The nature of my work led me to specialize in workflows that move data in massive batches, balancing cost efficiency and performance across database sources with very different paradigms.
I prefer writing the data transformation software myself with a core set of tools, rather than relying on expensive but rigid products.
Cloud Infrastructure
Most of the software I've made is optimized to run on cloud infrastructure — Azure, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform — with a good grasp of how their pricing works and how to exploit their potential.
I know these systems well and can easily jump from one to another with a good set of tools to build from.
Agentic Workflows
I recently integrated agentic engineering techniques into my practice to produce two to three times more software than I used to, working with products from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and local models.
As these technologies evolve, I stay on the edge of the latest tools, models and methodologies in my everyday work.
Coaching & Assessment
My main objective as an engineer is keeping our processes and decisions aligned with the goals of the product we're making — always asking: what's the best way to deliver value to our user?
Alongside my years engineering software, I've spent as long mentoring workmates and teaching good practices for this industry.
Work & Education
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2024 - Present Computer Engineering
- Pursuing an Engineer's degree in Computer Engineering.
- Expected completion: 2030.
- Sharing professional knowledge through university-issued courses for classmates.
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March 2022 - Present Backend Engineer
- Worked with multiple teams to deliver scalable apps for small businesses, serving tens to hundreds of users.
- Provided strategic guidance to technical leadership, optimizing project management and engineering workflows.
- Engineered massive data integrations between external proprietary systems and internal products, including e-commerce, payment and national invoicing solutions.
- Designed, deployed, and maintained robust Azure cloud infrastructure, maximizing efficiency and scalability.
- Optimized applications to run on offline-first local environments with embedded devices like Raspberry Pis.
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November 2020 - January 2022 Backend Engineer
- Worked with a small team to create ERP software for Chinese retailers in Spain from scratch.
- Developed scalable RESTful APIs using ASP.NET Core, Azure Functions, and EF Core.
- Implemented distributed data pipelines with SQL Server, Redis, and Azure Service Bus.
Personal Projects
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Meriplaza
A full ecommerce platform for Venezuela — marketplace, supermarket price comparison, payment gateway and fiscal invoicing — running entirely on Cloudflare's free tier.
Meriplaza is built for the realities of the Venezuelan market: dual-currency pricing in bolívares and USD at the BCV rate, local payment methods like Pago Móvil and cash divisas, SENIAT-compatible fiscal invoicing, and clients on low connectivity and cheap hardware. The live product is a single TypeScript Cloudflare Worker (Hono, D1, KV) serving around 700 stores, 1,600 products and 82,000 offers, alongside Go microservices for self-hosted deployments. The frontend is framework-free: server-rendered HTML with progressive enhancement that keeps working with JavaScript disabled.
- Supermarket mode ranks ~700 stores by distance and compares grocery prices product by product across the nearest ones.
- Money is never a float: integer minor units in both Go and TypeScript, verified against identical test vectors.
- Oversell-safe stock and idempotent payments on D1, with no cross-request transactions needed.
- QuickPago, the from-scratch payments engine, doubles as a standalone Stripe-like gateway with its own portal and payment links.
View on GitHubLive demoTypeScriptGoCloudflare Workers
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CLU — Core LLM Utility
An AI agent loop at the operating system level, built the Unix way.
Most agent frameworks are libraries where the loop, the model client and the tools all live inside one process behind one plugin API. CLU takes the Unix approach instead: the loop is a process, the inference provider is a process, every tool and middleware is a process, and they all talk newline-delimited JSON over stdin/stdout. The pipe is the plugin API. The whole system is pure Go with zero third-party dependencies — about 1,100 lines across 10 binaries.
- Any executable that honors the tiny contract can replace any built-in piece — tools in Python, providers in Rust, shell one-liners as middleware.
- Process isolation by design: a crashing tool can't take down the loop, and swapping the model provider is a CLI flag.
- Every component runs and debugs by hand — pipe JSON into a tool binary and read the answer.
View on GitHubGoAI Agents
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Reeler
A native Android downloader for videos, images and carousels — no servers, no Python, pure Kotlin.
Paste a link — get the media. Reeler re-implements yt-dlp's extraction logic natively in Kotlin, talking directly to each platform's APIs from the device, so there is no backend and nothing to keep running in the cloud. It covers seven platforms from one paste box: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter/X, Facebook, Reddit and Pinterest — videos, images, galleries and photo-mode posts alike. Built with Jetpack Compose and Material 3, MVVM with Hilt, light and dark themes, edge to edge.
- Streaming downloads straight into MediaStore with live progress — a 4K video never has to fit in RAM, and half-written files never show up in the gallery.
- Background-safe via WorkManager, with share-to-download from any social app.
- Realm-backed history with thumbnails, in-app playback via ExoPlayer, and premium auth with Clerk.
- Screenshots are generated straight from the app's composables with Compose Preview Screenshot Testing.
View on GitHubKotlinJetpack Compose
More experiments
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Necronomicon
My personal knowledge base of software engineering and computer science — a bilingual (English and Spanish) documentation site built with Astro, React and Tailwind.
View on GitHubAstroMDX
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Nom.NET
A parser combinator library for .NET strongly inspired by Rust's nom, focused on safe parsing, streaming patterns, and staying as close to zero-copy as possible.
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SqlFace
An experimental development kit for SQL-based web interfaces: exploring how far you can get generating data-providing UIs straight from SQL.
View on GitHubC#TypeScript
UCAB Courses
Programming courses (in Spanish) that I teach to fellow students at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello.
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Introducción a C
An introductory course to the C programming language, from zero to pointers — with a course site featuring study material and interactive slides.
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Introducción a LibGDX
An introductory game development course with LibGDX, building a playable game in Java step by step.
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3D con LibGDX
A follow-up course introducing 3D graphics with LibGDX: cameras, models, lighting and 3D game loops.
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Introducción a Pygame
A 2–3 hour Pygame workshop themed after The Legend of Zelda (NES): the game is built live in 12 incremental steps, backed by a slides site with interactive demos.
GitHubPython