Camilo MATAJIRA

About me

My name is Camilo Matajira. I’m a software engineer specializing in Linux Infrastructure.

My educational background is in Industrial Engineering and Economics. I had the chance to study at one of the best universities in South America and was in the top 5% of my class on both degrees. In my first semester, I learned to program in Java and discovered my passion for programming. The following summer (2008), I built my first personal project, a brute-force Sudoku solver. I regret not switching immediately to computer science (though I switched later in life).

I continued programming in different languages, I programmed on VBA, I also programmed my TI-89 calculator, I programmed in Matlab, and Stata (to perform data analysis), I did optimization with GAMS and EXPRESS and I excelled in all kinds of programming tasks. I co-authored an economics paper which was published in a good journal, and wrote a dissertation called “The Impact of Encomienda in Colombia”. I traveled to Stanford (California) to present it –all expenses paid :).

Later, I wanted to do a PhD in Economics, and I got accepted to the M2( second year of master’s degree) of one of the best Universities in the world: The Paris School of Economics -aka PSE- (which is part of the Ecole Normal Superior).
Perhaps the best gift that PSE gave me was an internship at SAP, the German technology company.

At SAP I learned to program in R, which rekindled my love for programming and tech. And I also found out, that it was not necessary to have a Computer Science degree to be a Software Engineer. Back then I was convinced that no one could work on tech if he did not have a computer science degree.
I still remember the day when I asked a colleague about this, he told me: “It’s not necessary to have a computer science degree to be an excellent software engineer, the best programmer I have ever worked with was a psychologist!”

I made up my decision to switch to tech. I finished the M2, and did not continue with the PhD. I taught myself Python and wrote a brute-force sudoku solver with it (2017). I was lucky because I was able to land a job as a data developer (doing ELK and Grafana dashboards), which eventually turned into a position as Linux System Administrator. I was a sponge learning about everything. During that period I became proficient in Debian, Ansible, Bare metal servers (OVH), and all the components to serve web pages and APIs: load balancers (HaProxy), web servers (apache and Nginx), PHP, NFS servers, RAID (disk redundancy), HTTP, HTTPS, SSL certificates, networking, OSI layers, ssh keys, systemd, databases, security updates, Debian packages, docker, monitoring (Prometheus), CICD with Gitlab (actually a lot of CICD with Gitlab), Vim, Bash, Sed, Awk and all the command line utilities. And later, AWS, vpcs, ec2, ECS, s3, CloudFront, RDS, Terraform, Terragrunt, Kubernetes, etc. I also learned how to touch-type! I type currently at 80WPM 🙂

How did I learn so much in a short period? The first thing, I had to learn how to learn (and not forget). This led me to Anki. Second, I committed to read and review the 12 best books on System Administration. This took me around 2 years and a half:

Reading and reviewing all these books was a huge project indeed, probably the most ambitious of my life: And I finished. Nonetheless, despite all I learned I wanted to be the writer of the tools I used and my real dream was to program. I had the chance to become a Software Engineer, and so I did.

I learned Python Django (for APIs), I learned how to mock unit tests, how to do software releases, how to migrate databases, how to beg for code reviews, ORMs, and SQL. But, my skills on infrastructure cannot go unnoticed. So despite being defacto a Software Engineer, I am always summoned to do infrastructure-like kind of tasks. Hence, I improved my CICD skills now with Github, became proficient at writing Helm Charts for Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and Python tooling and packaging. (I like packaging because distributing my python projects has always been a headache!) The latest tool I became proficient in was Make (Makefile) and now everything looks like a Make project to me!

I also continued reading and reviewing books:

I have read more books, but haven’t had the time to review them, I forgot to mention that I have wife and two baby daughters now! Despite my lack of sleep, I wrote an article on how to provision servers/laptops in a completely automated way. This is the article that receives the most views on my website.

Today, I still live in France, in the Parisian suburbs with my beloved wife and our two daughters.
I’m always eager to try new opportunities, especially on projects that involve programming and Linux infrastructure.

If you have questions, you can contact me at ca.matajira966@gmail.com