My name is Jaime Romero, welcome to my blog and personal space on the net.
Here I will share my interests the ways we develop and deploy software with some things in between that I might also consider cool to share, including the things I am working on.
The next sections are meant to be an extension to my CV explaining in more detail who I am, what I do and what are my opinions.
Regarding my work experience or what I do, I am a kind of generalized specialist with a focus into Backend development of distributed systems, SRE and DevOps.
Regarding application development, I have mostly back-end development experience with C++ 14, C++20, Go, Java and Python.
Some frameworks I had the pleasure working with were:
Message Queues I have worked with:
Databases I have worked mostly with managed PostgreSQL instances, MySQL and SQLite.
Regarding front-end development, I am familiarized with ReactJS.
My favorite IDE is a Linux terminal with neovim (LazyVIM flavor), with vscode or codium as a second option.
Regarding AI, I prefer to getting it as far away from my code as possible and use it as a better version of Google and stack overflow or to process large quantities of logs or documentation. Mostly preferring self-hosted AI with Ollama running a small model such as Gemma-3.
In terms of raw metal and operating systems, I am good at working with Linux and strongly prefer it as my main work environment with focus on Debian based distros for stability, Arch based distros for experimentation and Alpine for container environments.
Regarding CI/CD pipelines, I have worked mainly with Jenkins.
Regarding cloud, I have experience with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. I do not really believe in certifications and value hands-on experience with these technologies. I have also used VPS services such as Ionos and Hetzner for simpler setups.
For IaC or Infrastructure as Code I have experience with Terraform and Ansible for cloud automation.
Regarding orchestration frameworks most of my experience comes from docker, docker-compose, Helm and Kubernetes.
In terms of virtualization managed virtual machines with KVM and worked with Open Stack, currently self-hosting a Proxmox cluster.
For monitoring, I prefer to work with Grafana, Grafana Loki and Prometheus in containerized environments. But had some experience working with Nagios in the past for more stable bare metal environments. In cloud monitoring I mostly have experience with AWS SDK for Go, specifically for building project specific utilities.
I studied computer engineering, but before that I had already spent some years messing around with computers, Linux and building my own scripts.
I began my career as a research assistant on my university on a department called Netcom, where I worked as a system administrator of their Linux machines as well as building some prototypes for researchers such as a small 4G network using OpenAirInterface. I worked mainly with Debian machines, Nagios, and Open Stack.
After that I worked in Ericsson Spain as a software engineer, working in the back-end building microservices with Go, Java and C++ to be run over Kubernetes to implement use cases for the 5G core network, specifically in UDM, UDR and IMS (in case you know what those acronyms mean).
This was a place with very high engineering standards due to the fact this was telecom software that needed to run in critical systems, I learned a lot about software development and architecture, agile methodologies and clean code. At the end of this phase I ended up with a really strict understanding of how to develop software, with exposure to secure coding techniques, hexagonal architecture, and several layers of testing (unit, integration, smoke).
During this time I went to several cybersecurity conferences in Spain and around Europe, which fueled my interest in this area.
After Ericsson I grew disillusioned (and kind of bored) by the slow-moving work I was doing in the telecom sector.
I went into a startup in Barcelona called TopDoctors focused in telemedicine as a back-end engineer to do work on their API to break it up into manageable microservices and solving performance issues with their search engine.
Here I learned how smaller companies work, how to deal with large quantities of technical debt and make technical decisions with time and budget limitations in a high pressure environment with non-technical leadership.
After that experience I did the freelancer thing for some time which helped me grow up my skills into more of a fullstack engineering role to do MVP development using ReactJS, Django and FastAPI. It also helped me to understand the implications of having a business, finding clients and delivering value through my work.
This was really my first experiment into entrepreneurship, which lasted until I began a master degree in cybersecurity. Even as a freelancer, the realities of the spanish tech market applied, had to operate outside all the regulations regarding labor and carry all the risk involved with handling my own business.
From this experience I learned that future ventures needed to occur within the context of a well defined product or service over a free market channel instead of selling my time or relying on third parties such as freelancing websites.
The main motivation for me to go into cybersecurity was that all the businesses I had come into contact with until that point required deep knowledge in this area due to their reliance on networked distributed systems, either in terms of their implementation, integration or vulnerability management.
Nobody had any actual idea how to do it well, so I decided to invest time and energy into acquiring those skills and insights to help the world have more reliable systems.
After spending most of my time becoming less of a n00b, I decided that the best way to leverage my skills was to focus into cloud security within a cloud engineering, SRE or DevOps role to help enterprises to build and design secure architectures.
This is why I accepted an offer from Inetum to work with clients in the banking sector doing this kind of work.
The main project I have been involved since, is the management of a SaaS acting as an API gateway for these kinds of clients, as well as the development of microservices to implement key policies and internal protocols or to improve our quality of service.
Some activities involve handling and troubleshooting incidents, building automating pipelines and workflows, managing multiple AWS accounts with a variety of technologies such as EKS, Fargate, EC2 instances and monitoring as much of it as possible.
I was originally hired as a cloud engineer but over time I realized this kind of work falls into the role of SRE, which involves wider aspects of managing a cloud infrastructure such as heavy use of automation, leveraging my software development skills acquired from previous lives.
Jaime Romero is a software engineer and cybersecurity expert operating in Western Europe.