👋 Hi! I'm Ulises Santana
Full Stack Developer with JavaScript as mother tongue and web as my home nation. Based in the Canary Islands 🏝️
About me
Hi, I'm Ulises Santana, based in the Canary Islands 🇮🇨, Spain 🇪🇸. I worked as Full Stack Developer on Lean Mind before taking a sabbatical, which I am doing right now. I have been creating web tech-based solutions since 2014, and some of these solutions have been used in multiple countries by millions of users.
I am passionate about programming, the web application ecosystem, and learning something new daily. I am very grateful to the developer community and all who have helped me become a professional developer. So since I want to give back that help, if you think I can help you in any way, drop me a message on Twitter. If I can't help you, maybe I know who can help you. By the way, I am very interested in projects with social good as an end, so do not hesitate to contact me if you think I can contribute in any way.
I was born in the Canary Islands, Spain, in a sunny small town located southwest of Gran Canaria, a wonderful place to grow up. Since I was a child, I spent hours surfing the internet and forums, so it was not a big surprise when I fell in love with the web ecosystem when I started as a Social Media Manager. From that very moment, I decided that the web was that "thing" to which I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life.
However, my destiny with the web seems to be that it would not be as a Social Media Manager. After two and a half years working in that role, I realized that marketing was not my thing, but web development was. That was the starting point for me to become a programmer and the motivation to leave the company I had co-founded and start my studies in web application development. I find marketing very interesting, but I prefer to program applications and let marketing lovers work in marketing.
I finished the Higher Technician in Web Application Development training in June 2017. Right after, I was hired as Backend Developer by Kentech, the company where I intern-shipped. Kentech provides tailored solutions across various verticals, specializing in the sports-focused online entertainment industry in multiple countries for millions of users. A year later, I was promoted to Full Stack Developer working with AngularJS, React, and Node.js, but also with Symfony, Docker and Rancher.
Three years after, I became part of Lean Mind, an incredible place where I worked for another almost three years as a Full Stack Developer with other developer teams for different clients with different technologies. However, luckily I was able to continue working on Node.js, allowing me to deepen the platform and increase my expertise in it. Also in Lean Mind I was very lucky to learn about sustainable code and learn from people as wonderful as Carlos Blé, María Soria, Cristian Suárez or Adrián Ferrera. This stage in Lean Mind undoubtedly marked a before and after in my life, professionally and personally.
Conferences & Events
Since I've been a developer for a living, I aim to keep up with JavaScript and the web, so I have tried to go to as many conferences as I am able to. This, ended up in attending events like JSConf EU where I had the opportunity to take a selfie with Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js and Deno. It was quite a fanboy moment.
As a thank you to the community, I have sponsored JSDay Canarias from 2018 to 2022 and PyDay Gran Canaria 2019, apart from also sponsor and co-organize the Global Day of Coderetreat Canarias 2019. Also, in November 2018, I had the opportunity to give a talk at JS Day Canarias about Node.js, npm and how to publish and maintain a package in an npm registry. I loved the experience, and I want to continue sharing knowledge with the rest of the world. Thanks to selfless people, I became a professional software developer. I want to contribute so that more people can do it by giving talks at events and educational centers or simply writing on my blog.
In 2022 I prepared a talk again. This time about learning from a work experience in which I optimized a process in Node.js from 5 hours to 5 minutes. It was a talk I gave at various events, such as JSDay Canarias or in the open space of Pamplona Software Crafters, and even wrote it down as a blog post.
On the personal side
I try to lead a sustainable day to day in which I can be creative, feeding my innate curiosity and allowing me to have time for myself and for things that do not have to do with software. This ends up resulting in, on the one hand, having open source projects like git-reporter, diff-lines or array-analyzer where I create tools for myself and make them available to others at the same time that I put into practice what I am learning about software crafting.
On the other hand, I love to cook, enjoy a good book, podcast, movie or series. I also enjoy nature walks with my chihuahua Mocha or spending time in my real garden. I say real because I also have a digital garden which I maintain with Obsidian, serving me also as my digital brain . In fact, I ended up publishing a plugin for Obsidian that allows you to see what notes you have pending to create.
If you want to know a little more about me, you can watch this interview that Adrián Ferrera did to me on his podcast Devs Lives.