About me

Rafael Gómez Blanes

I’m a software engineer, architect, and technology leader. For more than two decades, I’ve been building products and systems—and I still enjoy understanding how they work and finding ways to make them better.

My path has taken me from development to architecture and team leadership. I don’t see that as leaving engineering behind, but as bringing more perspectives together: technology, product, people, and business.

Software engineeringArchitectureTechnology leadershipQuantum computing

I started out as a developer at Telvent, now part of Schneider Electric. Over twelve years, my responsibilities grew from writing software to managing teams and projects. I worked with international teams and spent two years in Sweden, helping deploy a remote management system for smart meters.

At Solid Stack, I led technology for nine years: helping build the company, designing products for the electricity, gas, and water sectors, and managing teams of up to twelve people. Later, at Sportradar, I coordinated four squads—around forty people—in an international, cross-functional organization.

Today, at Cox, I work on architecture, software quality, and the evolution of corporate applications for the energy and water sectors. Across these roles, I’ve contributed to different stages of a product’s life, from its initial concept and first deployments to its operation and improvement.

02 / How I work

Engineering gets better when it connects with people and the product.

My technical experience shapes how I lead. Working with teams and products, in turn, changes the questions I ask when designing a solution.

01

Engineering

Software architecture and distributed systems, quality, clean code, testing, and refactoring: decisions that help make software understandable and able to evolve.

02

People

Technical leadership, mentoring, and Engineering Management. I care about creating the conditions for teams to learn, sustain good practices, and take ownership of their work.

03

Product

Understanding a product’s full lifecycle and who it serves. Technical decisions have context: business needs, operations, quality, and the ability to maintain what we build.

03 / Writing to learn

Sharing knowledge is part of the craft.

Writing makes me organize my ideas, question what I think I know, and explain what I’ve learned clearly. I’m the author of eleven technical books on software development and engineering, and I’ve also taught courses on software architecture and quality.

Here’s a small selection. You can find the full catalog on the books page.

Browse all my books
Cover of The Programmer's Black BookCover of The Practical Agile ProgrammerCover of The Coder Habits

04 / What I’m exploring

Being a student again is part of the journey.

After many years working with classical computing, I’ve devoted part of my recent learning to quantum computing, including a dedicated university master’s degree. I’m interested in its algorithms and, especially, how it can work alongside classical computing in hybrid systems.

My hands-on experience in this field is still growing: I’ve experimented with Python and Qiskit, and I’m developing reproducible introductory circuits with Jupyter. This is a new area of specialization I’m approaching through my software engineering background—not a claim to an established professional track record in quantum computing.

Read about quantum computing

05 / Keep exploring

If you’d like to know how I think, start with what I write.