Software engineer · in motion
I build software the way a cat studies a room — slowly, from every angle, before committing to a single, deliberate leap.
I'm a software engineer who reads architecture diagrams the way some people read tarot — looking for the shape of a thing before touching it.
Teams I've joined and systems I've left better than I found them — the CV, in fewer words.
An AI venture studio. I joined part-time, stayed, and now lead a team of six — container streaming infrastructure on Cloud Run, real-time SSE services in FastAPI, Litestar at the core, and a WhatsApp platform clinics lean on daily.
End-to-end data solutions for SMEs. I taught the ETL pipeline some manners — 90% fewer duplicates via DBT, and pre-load tests so only clean data ever touched Snowflake.
Commerce tooling for small businesses. I helped unbundle a Django monolith into Flask microservices — development got 133% faster — and built the CI/CD that made deploys uneventful.
A free career platform for underserved Filipino students. Reading academic calendars carefully lifted workshop engagement 160%, and a homemade Discord bot kept a 400-member community talking.
DIY lab software bridging labs and hospitals in the Philippines. I structured the analytics repository that made the team 50% faster, and built dashboards that let a partner lab finally see its own patients.
A short list. I'd rather make four things that breathe than forty that don't.
My knowledge management system — half journal, half lab notebook, where reading turns into thinking out loud.
A homegrown Home Assistant companion — a little BMO that watches the house and answers back.
A Papers, Please–inspired browser game that teaches cloud security — inspect the paperwork, spot the bad requests, stamp accordingly.
A combat and score tracker for the Munchkin card game — a fantasy-themed dashboard for levels, modifiers, and settling table arguments.
Workshops and talks — where I think out loud with other people in the room.
A game-dev night building spec-first with Kiro — letting the spec drive the code instead of the other way around.
A hands-on walk through running containers on AWS — deploying the same app to ECS and EKS to feel the trade-offs between the two.
An introduction to the AWS console and core building blocks — the mental model you need before reaching for anything more advanced.
Going deeper on containers in AWS — images, registries, and orchestration on managed services.
Standing up your first n8n automation on Google Cloud — from deploy to a working workflow.
Building useful AI agents without writing code — wiring tools and prompts into something that actually does the work.
I write to find out what I think. Most of it lives at brain.neilriego.me.
I'm slow to reply, but I always reply. Pick whichever feels least formal.