About

Hello there and thanks for passing by.

I’m Luis, a senior full-stack web developer focused on WordPress.

I have been providing enterprise-grade custom-built WordPress solutions for companies and agencies for about a decade.

If you want to discuss a blog post or maybe work together, don’t hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Website building approach

Websites can be built in many different ways, but I firmly believe the choice of tools when making one has implications that extend deep into the future.

My development stack has been evolving for years, and I look for ways to enhance it every single day.

A good starting point provides compound benefits throughout time in terms of visibility, conversions and costs reduction.

My site building philosophy is sustained in these three axioms:

A website development project usually comprises a set of different, complex tasks. Coding is just one of them. Because of this, I sometimes rely on other professionals I wholeheartedly trust to also provide graphic design, text creation, SEO & SEM, video and 3D.

How I got here

I was born in A Coruña, Spain, in 1984.

Since an early age, I enjoyed learning on my own.

My first computer was an Amstrad. It had an 8 MHz 8086 microprocessor, the same used by the earlier Space Shuttle missions. It helped me to understand the foundations of operative systems and the basics of programming. I also accessed to the internet for the first time with it.

I built my first website in Notepad while I was in high school. It was about the Russian composer Scriabin.

I studied Law and Business Administration, but I kept creating websites for every student side project I could.

A couple of years later, I finally decided to follow my passion and moved on to start a career as a freelance web developer. More than 40,000 working hours later, here I am.

A professional insight

My path through the web development path was pretty straightforward: I started as a freelancer thirteen years ago and has since been one.

Programming-wise, I’m self-taught. Whenever I face a problem, I prefer to figure out things myself. If it’s something new, I’ll search for a solution and adapt it to my liking. I’ve learnt most of the things I know on my own, just by experimenting, experiencing or reading. This formula has served me well over the years.

I discovered WordPress around 2011. I’ve been refining my tech stack around it since then. While I can work with any kind of WordPress installation, when I’m in charge I always choose to work with a custom theme.

During these years, I’ve worked with many amazing clients. I’m proud that some relationships are still on after more than 10 years.

I’ve had close collaborations with many graphic designers, marketers and other digital professionals. I’ve learnt from all of them and made friends with quite a few.

And I’ve also collaborated with agencies, both on a per-project basis and under a contract agreement. It’s always refreshing to adapt my style and ideas to new, collaborative ways. I also appreciate the opportunity to have a first-hand understanding of their different structures, tech stacks and processes.

A personal insight

I live with my wife and our three kids in the mountains. We opted for a low-key life, surrounded by nature and community.

I’m an avid listener of classical music, ranging from medieval monophony to contemporary minimalism. I also love hiking and photography.

Since my first camera had terrible image quality, I wrote my own demosaicing and denoising algorithms, which are now widely used on quite a few open-source image processing software.

I used to play competitive chess as a kid, but I abandoned that path too soon. I recently discovered the antichess variant, which depends more on logic than theory. You can challenge me on Lichess.

What I’ve got my hands into right now

At this moment I’m working on:

• Client work: post-launch support for AMSlab, TattooContract and Centro Oeste.
• Client work: implementing a custom theme for Finnovating with my fellow friend Valeria Scaloni.

I have started other side-projects:

• I’m working on femto.css, a pluggable classless stylesheet. It uses only those modern CSS techniques that ensure a broad compatibility, it’s ultra optimized and has a beautiful typographic implementation.
• I’m always polishing my enterprise base theme Glossa.
• I’m back at the design table to design a non-local image demosaicing algorithm. The goal is to outperform RCD, which is a core part of some of the best RAW developers out there. The code is under the MIT licence on GitHub and is used by millions of photographers world-wide.

I’m reading «The Daily Stoic – by Ryan Holiday».