Where I am now and where I’ve been

Hi, my name is Rich Cabrera, I’ve decided to jump on board the Tech blog ship under the recommendation of several colleagues. I find that sharing experiences about the technologies we use and encounter in our jobs helps us to learn more about them. Which seems to come naturally when trying to explain a topic, it seems to force me to research it more so that I can properly explain or discuss it.

That being said, whether or not anyone actually read these blogs is inconsequential as I am using it as a tool to help me enhance my writing skills and learn more about the technology/design I have decided to butcher in each post (and if you are reading this and I’ve stated something incorrect or maybe outdated, please correct me via email or comment).

So how did I get here, or better yet, where have I been?

Ipreo - Application Architecture Intern

My journey outside of a classroom began in June 2014 as an Application Architecture Intern at Ipreo where I was tasked with converting a RDL widget into an HTML 5 widget with support across browsers down to IE8 (developing support for IE8 took just as much time as converting the widget took altogether and a few extra libraries, never again please). We also had a group intern project - “How to turn our company into a $1 Billion company” (which, actually happened due to an acquisition that occured during our internship ironically enough). Ipreo was heavily focused on large securities, mutual funds, bulge bracket clients, etc…

So our big pitch was to open the company up to individual consumers and we developed an app with an idea for how to do that. We essentially built a stock recommendation tool to help beef up your portfolio depending on a security you were interested in, weighting investors, categorizing by investment style and displaying the top shared investments of those top investors. The idea being that if these top investment firms where all also interested in certain securities and shared your similar investment style then you too would want to invest into those other companies. This was all built using Python, a graph data visualization library (I can’t remember the name), and Davos (Ipreo’s data warehouse).

After the internship was finished, myself along with a few others were offered to work as Software Engineers under contract with Ipreo. I accepted the position and that brought me to my next step in my journey.

Ipreo - Software Engineer

I worked part time during the school year and full time during the summers with Ipreo from September 2014 until December 2016 and began with assignments to clear the backlog on the Research Sales and Trading Team. I was tasked with rapidly learning C#, ASP.Net, SQL, SSRS, essentially familiarizing myself with the .Net Framework and the Microsoft set of enterprise tools; which was enjoyable at times and dreadful for an equal amount of that learning experience. I was mainly working on report generation for our bulge bracket clients; fixing bugs, implementing new enhancements, etc… Here I learned best practices, Scrum, Agile, and how to work with a team on the other side of the world (Ukraine).

Once I finished clearing the backlog I was moved the the Product Architecture and Design team where I was thrust into the world of The Cloud. No need to address them here but Ipreo had a lot of technologies that were beginning to be very outdated and deployment practices that needed to be improved. This team was at the forefront of all of that for the company, I developed experience in AWS, Docker, DevOps - CI/CD, Blue/Green Deployment, Infrastructure as code (CFT), the importance of resiliency, availability, durability, and how to achieve all of them efficiently. I was under great leadership and a great mentor at the time. Excited at all the new technologies I jumped at every opportunity to learn and took an AWS course which assisted me in attaining my first certification - AWS Certified Developer Associate. I had also worked on and developed my own microservice from scratch, a part of a larger enrollment service in which we were one of the first adopters of .Net core as soon as it was released.

This brings me to where I am now, as in December of 2016 I left Ipreo and accepted a position with Capital One.

Capital One - Software Engineer

I started with Capital One in July of 2017 on the HR Tech team and have been working with some great people here. In the short time I’ve been here I’ve learned the Salesforce platform and how to develop on it, built countless integrations, designed and developed Capital One’s Severance system and am now taking aim at the redesign of their Joining experience (Which having just been through it a year and a half ago, I can say is much needed). I’ve attained the Salesforce Platform Developer I certification and am studying towards my next few AWS certifications.

Looking Forward

I have found that my passion lies in the Design and Architecture of systems and I am planning on using this blog to discuss different Design patterns, Architectures, and whichever technology I am trying to wrangle at the time.

My posts may not be on any certain schedule but I hope to at least put out one every month or so.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or concerns - my personal email is richacabrera@gmail.com and I would recommend using “Tech Blog” as your Subject. Thanks!