About · the durable version
I build systems that help people do more of the work themselves.
That can mean clearer data for an early-childhood program, a sensor that tells a café what is running low, an agent that keeps its evidence visible, or a technical idea taught in Spanish without sanding off the difficult parts.
Tijuana taught me to look across boundaries.
I grew up at an intersection of languages, institutions, and ways of seeing a problem. Later, public-policy research at PPIC showed me that a careful analysis can change a law—but only if someone can understand and use it. That thread carried me from research and visualization into data engineering, product work, and AI operations.
TalkingPoints was a four-year systems apprenticeship.
From 2022 through 2026, I worked across the data surface of a multilingual education platform: warehouse architecture, partner analytics, enterprise integrations, a new attendance API, impact research, and AI evaluation. The infrastructure work reduced Snowflake cost by 70%; the larger lesson was that technical leverage comes from understanding the human decision on the other side of the system.
Read the six-part case studyThe work now spans four connected practices.
I am a Data Architect at First 5 Alameda County, building public-serving data infrastructure. I also co-founded Relod, publish and teach through Tacos de Datos, and build agent-native tools such as Nahual and Garita. Around those flagships is a wider workbench of hardware, apps, writing systems, and small tools that start with a real annoyance and earn their way into something durable.
See the practice-led portfolioJoyful Brutalist Minimalism is a working constraint.
Leave the structure honest. Show the receipts. Keep the person in control. Ship the smallest useful slice. Watch what a system costs to run, not just to build. Then leave enough warmth, humor, and texture that using it feels worth the effort.
Useful is not the same as technically reachable.
I work primarily in English and Spanish, and also speak French and Portuguese. I choose to write and teach in English and Spanish because knowledge locked behind one language is not fully public. The goal is not merely translation; it is giving people enough context to use an idea, question it, and make it their own.