About · Software engineer
Francisco Rodrigues
A software engineer who'd rather tend and grow a system over years than rewrite it from scratch every six months. I write here as The Codeherd.
The name is a small pun. A shepherd tends a flock patiently — knows each animal, notices when one’s off, doesn’t panic. I try to be a little of that for the systems I keep: present, attentive. Always with an eye on turning technical quality into business value.
I write here to reflect in public. The notes are where I work out an opinion; the tech radar is where I track what’s moving — the tool I use to keep the market in view.
Trajectory
Solutions for the whole engineering team, not for one squad. Helped modernise our edge architecture and pull authorization out of the legacy monolith with OPA. Now setting the house standard for AI-assisted programming: building skills, teaching, automating processes, and defining the policies.
The squad's focal point and the person answerable for its technical quality, bridging functional and technical requirements. GraphQL and Apollo BFFs in TypeScript, a Next.js frontend, PHP APIs and Kafka consumers, and an Order to Cash process integrated with SAP Business One — the Avro decoding from that stretch turned into open source contributions.
Brought consumer-group-lag autoscaling to the whole organisation with KEDA, replacing the scaling we had been doing by hand every week. Along the way, first contact with Kubernetes, GCP, Kafka and Go — and a system refactored from O(n) to O(1) space, dropping its memory use by at least 90%.
An international team, building for the Dutch mortgage market. Microservices, legacy maintenance, and introducing e2e and integration tests to APIs that had none.
Internal PHP libraries — the stretch where I got the most practice at object-oriented design. Modernised a legacy system by introducing a front controller and an incremental path toward MVC.
Fullstack with PHP, CodeIgniter and jQuery, across web applications and the technical support and billing modules of the house ERP.
The first job with the title developer, still an intern: iOS in Objective-C, and a first contact with git, design patterns and working alongside other people.
What I care about
Responsible software
Code is a thing you live with, not a thing you launch. I optimise for the version of me who has to read it in two years.
Evidence over hype
Show me the trace, the benchmark, the failure. An honest "I don't know yet" beats a confident slide every time.
Teaching by writing
If I can't explain it plainly, I don't understand it yet. Writing is how I find the gaps in my own thinking.