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Malcolm Navarro
Malcolm Navarro
VP of Technology @ Templum

Hello!​

My name is Malcolm Navarro and this is my personal website. I'm 27 years old, I was born in Brazil and I currently live in Austin, Texas with my girlfriend and 2 dogs. Over the next several weeks I'm hoping to share a few blog posts with you spanning across different Software Engineer topics. Eventually, I aim to share some coding tutorials and notes that I feel could be beneficial to engineers of all levels.

Let this be a case study for yet another developer starting a website with the intent of keeping their life and thoughts in sync with their digital presence.

I consider myself a Fullstack Engineer and really do appreciate the different challenges across the stack.

On the Front End​

I've been professionally working with ReactJS and the ecosystem that follows it for the past several years. Although a little clunky, I do find Redux/Redux-Saga to be useful tools on the FE belt when working with large projects. I'm really excited about how hooks are changing the way composable logic is written/used and hope to share some of the best ones I've written so far.

I find CSS to be the easiest yet most frustrating part of the FE job but do think Styled Components/Emotion (CSS-in-JS) have made that a far better experience as a developer.

I've been slowly gravitating towards using TypeScript for everything. The language has come a long way and the type-safety is very nice when coming from an object oriented language. As we all know, JavaScript has its quirks. More on this soon.

On the Back End​

For the first couple years when I started my Software Engineer career I worked almost exclusively with Java and the Spring framework. I still really enjoy Java and keep up with the language but as of late I'm the most comfortable with .NET/C# for APIs on an enterprise level.

Things that interest me:

  • gRPC and remote procedures
  • Cache (Memcache, Redis, etc.) Mechanisms
  • Pub/Sub Technologies
  • GraphQL (working on side-project with HotChocolate at the moment)

I enjoy the flexibility of NodeJS and how it makes fullstack more seamless but find NodeJS backends are more rare to come by at scale. Although I've heard stories (met a Jake from Uber on a Ski bus once), I have yet to work on a large scale, production NodeJS backend so I can't confidently have an opinion on its true capabilities.

My real passion is on the backend. It's where the hard shit happens. It's where I see the most computer science-like challenges that really put the brain to work.

Next on the list is Golang and Rust!

Note: I have since become a Golang specialist and think down on Java as a programming language muahahah. Less is more.

Databases​

I started my career with SQL dbs and have only professionally worked with SQL dbs. PostgreSQL is my personal favorite. Professionally, I've been work with SQL Server the past few.

I've worked with DynamoDB and Firebase's Firestore but haven't worked too heavily with non-relational databases.

The databases on my list to do a side-project with:

  • Neo4j
  • CockroachDB

DevOps​

Don't even get me started. This is a black hole I only enter when needed. Kudos to Firebase/Heroku for simplifying things. Azure/AWS are great too. I'm fairly familiar with Kubernetes but there's always more to learn there.

Talk Soon​

So why does any of that matter? It probably doesn't. This is just the first blog post where I wanted to briefly introduce myself and talk about some of the technologies that I work with and have experience in while also expressing my opinions on them. Like you all, I have plenty to learn still. I hope that through these blogs I can stay more engaged and set the foundation for what's to come.