My name is Luis Lavena. I was born in the early 80s in Tucumán (Argentina) and discovered computers when I was 8 years old.

Originally wanted to be an architect — loved drawing and follow my godfather's steps — but computers gave me the power to not only dream and draw those ideas but also give them life.

A bit of an irony that today, I help cross-discipline teams — strategists, designers, and engineers — to architect and build sites and applications. 😄

While started with BASIC on a Talent MSX computer, I've used many languages over the years, to name a few: C, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, and Crystal (being the last two the ones I enjoy the most).

Before the Web era and the boom of SaaS, I specialized in building software solutions for broadcast stations (TV and cable networks) a highly demanding industry that required 24/7 functionality, not to mention interacting with some weird hardware, custom SDKs, and real-time needs. Oh, and Windows, let's not forget about that.

That love for highly efficient solutions led me to choose more pragmatic and simpler solutions, which I try to apply in my daily life and contributions to projects I work on.

Tackling problems and finding solutions always motivates me, but nothing compares to sharing those with the world and collaborating with others, integrating them, and providing something better on each release.

For more than 8 years I built, preached, patched, and maintained a Ruby distribution for Windows called RubyInstaller. Between 2007 and 2015, with 52 releases and more than 4 million downloads gave me a perspective on the impact of your contributions and the importance of collaboration.

Nowadays, I build simpler open-source tools for others like me.

Since then and for more than 14 years I've been in the role of Engineering Director at AREA 17, building great products with great people for culture, education, and e-commerce platforms for several brands and institutions.