I’m a software developer hailing from Venezuela. I studied Software Engineering between 2002 and 2008 in the beautiful Simón Bolívar University (we call it the USB):

In 2002 I knew I liked programming and it turned into love as I learned more. During those years I met my best friends including my wife, I started a web development company where we built many client sites and did my favorite thing ever: learning new things.

During those years, I also experienced the ugliness of a State that made retaliation and revenge their agenda. I was blessed to be born into a middle class family that worked for the state’s oil company, but after dad was fired in 2002 and stripped from his retirement savings we moved to Canada.

Moving countries usually means you need to work harder than ever to make it, specially when the alternative is going back to a place you don’t really want to go back to. This meant working at a company that wasn’t professionally in my carreer path, and keeping up to date with software development on my spare time.

joaquin.windmuller.ca

I use this site to put out my thoughts on things that interest me. If you have a comment or want to get in touch my main water cooler is mastodon, so [send me a toot][mastodon] if you want to reach me. I like photography and my DSLR shots live on flickr and my phone shots on instagram.

Previous projects / work

Unfortunately life has gotten too busy lately, so I’m not working on any of these projects, so they are listed here for historical reasons:

1. I created a community for people that want to publish fan fiction at Fictionesque.com. It was built using CakePHP and was mildly successful (10k users, about 1200 monthly active).
2. I started to learn iOS programming and built my first iOS app TinyFurniture It allowed you to draw a floor plan and determine if the furniture you are eyeing would fit in the room, it was perfect when moving to our new place.
3. QuickShopper A shopping list app with a twist. Most apps group the list by category (meats, produce, etc.) this one didn’t bother with categorizing and instead learned from your habits on how you pick items as you go through the grocery store.
4. I’m a staunch believer in diversity and making the tech industry a more welcoming environment for women. I volunteered between 2013 and 2019 my time at the local Ladies Learning Code chapter

Even Older projects

The Software Engineering programme at the USB required students to do an internship or a final project in the last year. Two of my friends and I decided to do a project, for that we built an eLearning platform called Osmosis on top of CakePHP.

Back then, I also wanted a blogging software with custom post types to allow me to create different layouts for each kind of post. I was also accustomed to the neat organization afforded by the MVC in CakePHP.

For both reasons, this meant Wordpress was out of the question. And because I had less experience than time I built Blogmill. I’ve since moved away from it because I haven’t updated the code to use the new CakePHP versions (I’ve also realized I don’t care about custom post types). This site runs on top of Camel.