Camilo Bravo, Developer in Quito, Pichincha, Ecuador
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Camilo Bravo

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Quito, Pichincha, Ecuador

Toptal member since June 7, 2016

Bio

Camilo has worked remotely on significant projects, including the NBC Olympics website. He stays current with emerging technologies while honing long-term skills like Haskell. With experience managing small development teams, he also served as CTO of a 30-person outsourcing company across Ecuador, Colombia, and New York.

Portfolio

PowerNotes
Scrum, Business Analysis, Go, PHP, JavaScript, MongoDB, PostgreSQL...
Monarq
React Native, JavaScript, TypeScript, Drupal API, Drupal
Digital Intent
Go, JavaScript, PHP, TypeScript, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB...

Experience

  • PHP - 18 years
  • JavaScript - 13 years
  • MySQL - 10 years
  • Go - 7 years
  • MongoDB - 7 years
  • Drupal 8 - 5 years
  • Symfony - 4 years
  • Vue - 2 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Windows, Linux

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on is the 2014 NBC Olympics site on which many teams needed to be coordinated to bring a world-class Drupal experience to users.

Work Experience

CTO

2022 - 2024
PowerNotes
  • Implemented new features integrating AI into the current system.
  • Managed a small development team during the implementation of various features.
  • Created a system to extract BI data using a custom data warehouse, mainly using Go, Kafka, and PostgREST.
  • Managed the infrastructure for the project, including setting up DNS configuration with Amazon Route 53, monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch, load balancing, and administrating relational and document-based databases.
Technologies: Scrum, Business Analysis, Go, PHP, JavaScript, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache Kafka, Node.js, Continuous Integration (CI), HTML, Chrome Extensions, Artificial Intelligence (AI), OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini API, OpenAI API, Claude, API Development, React, Full-stack Development, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53

Head of Mobile Development

2018 - 2022
Monarq
  • Developed a multiplatform mobile app for the Shelter Cluster to improve the efficiency of humanitarian aid.
  • Came up with a flexible way of integrating Drupal content into a React Native mobile app so that the content stays cached on the phone and bandwidth usage is minimal.
  • Launched the Shelter Cluster mobile app successfully.
Technologies: React Native, JavaScript, TypeScript, Drupal API, Drupal

Senior Software Engineer

2017 - 2022
Digital Intent
  • Developed many features for existing projects, mainly using PHP, Go, and various flavors of JavaScript.
  • Participated in a Scrum-style team using Jira to handle issue tracking.
  • Created efficient standalone services using Go for file management, real-time commenting, and usage reporting.
Technologies: Go, JavaScript, PHP, TypeScript, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache Kafka, Docker, Docker Compose, Chrome Extensions, Firefox Extensions, Amazon S3 (AWS S3)

Designer | Sole Developer

2016 - 2021
Facilitario
  • Created an innovative way to organize activities meant for workshops.
  • Designed UX wireframes for all pages on the website and visual design for the actual implementation.
  • Collaborated closely with an Ecuadorian human rights institution to add initial content.
Technologies: Drupal 8, CSS, UX Wireframes

CMS Screener

2016 - 2019
Toptal
  • Performed hundreds of technical interviews for applicants in the Drupal specialization.
  • Created new tests and tasks used for the screening of Drupal developers.
  • Helped grow the Drupal specialization in the Toptal network.
Technologies: Drupal, Interviewing, Questionnaires

Chief Engineer

2016 - 2017
Hinted
  • Implemented a complete redesign, revamping the back-end code to match the new face of the site.
  • Led the development of new features, including being part of the decision process.
  • Handled the development side of the project, including managing tasks for other developers.
  • Designed custom logging and background processes to handle the more complex pieces of the project and generate reports used for decision-making.
  • Handled a severe DDoS attack by implementing security features that effectively stopped the attacks.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Algolia, MongoDB, Laravel, API Development

Senior Drupal Back-end Developer

2014 - 2015
Appnovation
  • Worked on several Drupal sites for clients, such as Pfizer and the Red Cross.
  • Created custom Drupal modules to handle specific functionality, such as a "save for later" function for forms.
  • Customized extensively the Entity Forms module.
Technologies: Drupal, API Development

Senior Developer | Tech Lead

2013 - 2015
Code and Theory
  • Worked in developing huge websites for global audiences, the largest (NBC Olympics), handling over a billion visitors in less than a month.
  • Led a small team of developers in implementing the San Francisco travel website.
  • Handled a complex site migration (the Golf Channel site) to Drupal, including content import of thousands of articles.
  • Fixed many issues involving load testing for high-traffic sites using tools like New Relic.
  • Worked closely with teams from companies such as Google, Adobe, Akamai, and Acquia.
Technologies: Drupal, PHP, API Development

CTO

2011 - 2015
Jobsity
  • Helped grow the company from only a handful of employees to over forty.
  • Established processes and specialized systems for hiring and training developers. Involved in the professional growth of dozens of talented people.
  • Created a system for tracking candidate developers on top of Drupal.
  • Worked with many clients, mainly in the US and Canada, on high-profile projects such as the NBC Olympics website.
Technologies: Training, Full-stack, Mentorship, Team Mentoring, Career Coaching, API Development

Co-founder | Architect | Lead Developer

2011 - 2014
Pricetag
  • Architected and built the entire back-end of the application and coded a lot of its front end as well.
  • Guided other developers who later worked on the project to ensure a stable codebase.
Technologies: MySQL, Zend Framework, PHP

Sole Developer

2012 - 2013
Leyes del Ecuador
  • Developed an iOS app to showcase Ecuadorian laws.
  • Created a "virtual corkboard" function to take notes from the law texts, complete with skeuomorphic graphics and animations.
  • Added in-app purchases for other laws.
Technologies: Objective-C, iOS

Senior Developer

2007 - 2013
GoalQuest
  • Created many base components for a custom PHP framework built from scratch, the most visible being a complex reusable "list view" component.
  • Implemented functionality that reached thousands of users in the education sector.
Technologies: MySQL, PHP

Senior Developer

2011 - 2012
Funny Garbage
  • Implemented functionality for a social network for military families (with the Sesame Street brand).
  • Migrated the company website to Drupal, including a large portfolio section.
Technologies: Drupal, PHP

Independent Developer

2006 - 2008
Online Freelance Agency
  • Achieved a perfect score for all the projects.
  • Among many other projects, worked on an interesting script to parse poker game logs for PokerStars.com, extracting key information for the games.
  • Implemented many bits of functionality for the MetroLyrics.com site, such as a copy/paste prevention script and various embeddable widgets.

Developer

2007 - 2007
Tanzanite Foundation
  • Developed a Contacts application using .NET.
  • Created a complex search page with custom filtering to sort through the contacts.
Technologies: VB.NET

Developer

2005 - 2006
Mushoq
  • Worked on several high-profile projects for Ecuador.
  • Created a scalable search algorithm for a 100,000+ article newspaper site that reduced search times from over a minute to under a second.
Technologies: MySQL, PHP

Experience

Facilitario

http://facilitar.io
Facilitario is a personal project I have been working on for some time that allows users to generate workshops quickly based on existing activities. The activities are entered by organizations that specialize in human rights and education.

This is still a work in progress, but there is some real content, and it has already been useful for creating workshops around the Ecuador 2016 earthquake.

Leyes del Ecuador for iOS

Leyes del Ecuador is an iOS app made for the iPad and iPhone, which contains several laws from Ecuador. It features a "virtual corkboard" system in which specific articles can be stored as notes and shared by email later. The app has reached #1 in the Ecuadorian App Store several times, and has been downloaded more than 30,000 times as of January 2016.

Acquia Grand Master Certification

http://certification.acquia.com/user/136
Drupal certification from the company behind Drupal itself—I was the first person from Latin America (except Brazil) to receive this. I also participated in several DrupalCon events and even made a presentation in one in which I told the story of having organized an independent "Drupal Camp" event in my home country.

Top 3% Overall in Stack Overflow

http://stackoverflow.com/users/368864/cambraca
I use this site frequently and have gotten over 25k points. Some of my answers have many upvotes and views (the highest one has almost 1000 votes as of Sep 2024). I'm also active in other Stack Exchange sites such as Drupal Answers.

CModel

https://github.com/cambraca/CModel
This code originates from my past Pricetag project and is currently hosted on a GitHub repository.

The primary objective of this project was to construct a foundational model for Zend Framework. These classes enable seamless database mapping and provide convenient features such as automatic collections. While this code is not executable, the corresponding GitHub repository contains test code for evaluation purposes.

NBC Olympics Site

I worked for this amazing billion-visit website in 2014 and was in charge of some fundamental parts. I managed the whole "Olympic Zone" functionality, for which I had to go deep into Drupal to customize its boot process (for example, it had to recognize a prefix in the URL to point the user to the appropriate mini-site, which came with some complex challenges due to the way Drupal works internally). I also had to ensure the site worked at scale (the infrastructure included around 50 app servers), which meant working on specialized optimizations.

Publication: Political Campaining on Twitter and Artificial Virality

https://www.labarraespaciadora.com/ddhh/la-campana-en-twitter-y-la-viralidad-artificial/
Wrote an article in the Ecuadorian magazine “La Barra Espaciadora” about the political misuse of Twitter by presidential candidates to create an artificial perception of virality. It includes a technical deep-dive into uncovering data trends using the Twitter API.

Education

2004 - 2009

Bachelor's Degree in Systems Engineering

Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFC) - Quito, Ecuador

Skills

Libraries/APIs

React, Vue, jQuery, Node.js, API Development, Facebook API, OpenAI API, X (formerly Twitter) API, Drupal API

Tools

Git, GitHub, PhpStorm, Adobe Lightroom, YouTrack, Jira, NGINX, NPM, Adobe Illustrator, Subversion (SVN), Adobe Photoshop, Apache, Let's Encrypt, Docker Compose, Grunt, Claude, Google Sheets

Languages

Sass, PHP, HTML5, CSS3, SQL, JavaScript, Go, Bash, VB.NET, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Java, Objective-C, Haskell, CSS, HTML, TypeScript, Regex

Platforms

Algolia, Drupal 8, Drupal 7, MacOS, Docker, Windows, Linux, Drupal, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Omniture, Android, iOS, Zendesk, Apache Kafka, Acquia Cloud, New Relic

Storage

MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), JSON/XML Schemas, Memcached

Frameworks

React Native, Zend Framework, Symfony, Laravel, AngularJS, Prototype Framework, Svelte

Paradigms

Agile, Functional Programming, Scrum, Continuous Integration (CI), Load Testing

Other

Full-stack Development, Interviewing, Questionnaires, UX Wireframes, Training, Full-stack, Mentorship, Team Mentoring, Career Coaching, Systems Engineering, Mathematics, Business Analysis, Chrome Extensions, Artificial Intelligence (AI), OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini API, Firefox Extensions, Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53, App UX, User Experience (UX), Programming, Cloud Infrastructure, Monitoring

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