whoami
Carlos Alarcon
Digital product developer, focused on mobile
Lima, Peru · GMT-5
How should this be made?
The same question at every layer: the architecture holding an app up, the screen someone taps one-handed while standing in an aisle, the model deciding what to show them. I write down what I learn answering it — mostly the things I wish I had found already written.
- What I build
- Digital product, mostly on mobile. Apps, libraries and tools other people use to do their job.
- How I work
- The full product lifecycle rather than an isolated ticket, with how the thing feels to use treated as part of the work. Agile in practice more than in ceremony.
- What I reach for
- Kotlin and TypeScript day to day. Clean Architecture with MVI, MVVM or MVP, depending on what the problem asks for.
Now
- Redesigning the LiveTrade Android application at Overall Strategy.
- Keeping the released version maintained while that redesign runs.
- Learning iOS and Python.
- Building this archive, and writing down what it teaches me.
Where the years went
Mobile DeveloperOverall Strategy S.A.C.
Overall runs process outsourcing, industrial and trade services across more than thirty cities in Peru. LiveTrade is what the brands it serves run their field teams on: one application for the promoter at the point of sale, the supervisor on the route and the analyst at a desk, where the signal does not reach and every one of them carries a different phone. A great many users, and not all of them in Peru.
- Redesigning the LiveTrade Android application.
- Maintaining the released Android version alongside that work.
- Working on point-of-sale capture, GPS attendance and the real-time reporting the operation depends on.
Shipping
LiveTrade
Livetrade Impulso
LiveTrade (redesign)
Mobile DeveloperAgrosmart S.A.C.
Software for agroindustry — applications used in packing houses and in the field, where the phone is cheap, the signal is poor, and the person holding it did not choose the tool. Five years of it, across more than a dozen projects.
- Delivered and maintained more than twelve projects for agroindustry companies.
- Migrated the Android codebase from Java to Kotlin.
- Integrated OCR with Tesseract and computer vision with ML Kit and OpenCV.
- Connected thermal point-of-sale printers over USB and Bluetooth.
- Wrote the shared internal component libraries the other projects were built on.
Shipping
DigitalDocs, KPI and Digital
Other applications
- Direct APK
What I work with
- MobileNative Android first, multiplatform where it earns its place.
- Kotlin
- Jetpack Compose
- Java
- Android SDK
- Android NDK
- Kotlin Multiplatform
- Swift
- Architecture & practiceHow the code is organised, tested, and kept honest over years.
- Clean Architecture
- MVI · MVVM · MVP
- SOLID
- Dependency injection (Dagger Hilt)
- Design patterns
- JUnit · Espresso
- GitFlow
- Scrum
- Vision, IoT & devicesSoftware that has to read the physical world and trust what it finds.
- ML Kit
- OpenCV
- Tesseract OCR
- MQTT
- ESP32 · M5Stack
- C · C++
- Thermal POS printers
- Web & servicesThe other half of a product, when the product needs one.
- TypeScript
- React
- Node.js
- Python
- Laravel · PHP
- MySQL
- SQLite
Education
- Systems EngineerUniversidad Autónoma de Ica2022
- BSc, Systems & Computer EngineeringUniversidad Alas Peruanas2018
Certification and recognition
- Scrum Fundamentals CertifiedScrumStudy2022
- 20th place, AdventJSmidudev2022
The rest of the setup
The editor, the machine, and the running stack behind this site are recorded separately.