Jay Cano

A web application for writers I created from scratch, including the interactive visual timeline. Thousands of users use the product, and the company has grown to seven employees with some external funding. The product has gone through many iterations, and in addition to technical skills, I also developed marketing, sales, and fundraising skills.

Aula is a social learning platform, a place where students and educators in a university can come together to learn. During my time at Aula, I was a tech lead in the area that developed tools for assessment, as well as integration with other assessment solutions.

As a VP of engineering at Techspert.io, I worked with the product, development, and data science teams to put together a workflow to develop new features for machine learning (ML) projects. The main challenge of any ML project is that they are based on research and development (R&D), meaning that the projects are open-ended and difficult to fit into schedules. The final process was running for six months before my time with the company ended, and we successfully delivered many new features providing visibility, predictability, and accountability.

I was part of the seventh cohort of the prestigious accelerator program. Entrepreneur First is a talent-first accelerator; instead of selecting people by their business ideas, they select people with above-average technical skills using a selection process similar to big tech companies.

As part of the program, I received training on running a startup (speaking with investors and customer development), but the best part of EF is joining their network. As part of the network, you have access to talent and investors, and you are part of a big pool of people who are always open to give advice.

By being part of this network, helping, and being helped by others, I truly became an entrepreneur.

Developed an admin panel for an IoT/smart car solution. The back end was developed using Java Spring and the front end used Ember.js. As part of my duties, I also helped maintain their Android mobile app and added two new features for getting the car state from their OBD device.

Hired as the project lead to set up the project and develop the first prototype of the tools. As a project lead, I assumed the roles of researcher, engineer, and developer. My tasks ranged from researching current methodologies for social network analysis to designing data visualization to defining the architecture, preparing a plan, and developing the software.

During my professional career, I have helped some startups as a technical consultant. I've done most of this work for free, on an ad-hoc basis, as it is this kind of mutual support that makes starting up bearable.

Notable startups I have the pleasure to support include Spartan Bits and Tink in Spain and Well Plan For Me in the UK. The founder of the latter has now moved on to a new startup, and I'm still acting as his advisor when he needs it.

During my time at Entrepreneur First, I was also actively involved with other companies in my cohort, exchanging advice and helping with technical skills they might have lacked at the time.

While it doesn't take full advantage of my skills, I have set up websites and blogs for other people and companies. I have set up websites for Centro de Referencia Linux in Spain, for my own company (Plotist), Autorose, and some websites for small projects (mostly personal). This in addition to many websites for friends and family. The websites were created using predominantly WordPress, although I have also used Joomla and Drupal.

Master Thesis. First steps in the development of a methodology or framework for the design of multi-agent systems (AI). The main goal was to use complexity science terminology and practices in the design of multi-agent systems and swarm intelligence.

Instead of using heavy AI or machine learning to solve problems, the thesis advocates simple, mostly reactive agents using simple rules that aggregated produce complex behavior that could be considered intelligent.

Master Thesis. An analysis of the squatter movement in London. The goal of the research was to frame squatting in London as a social movement, identifying the structures and resources, as well as the beliefs and behaviors of squatters. Interviews, observation, and documentary analysis were used in the development of this thesis.