The Role
A year and a half, between February 2009 and July 2010, with a technology and corporate training provider that also delivered custom enterprise software engineering. The company had won a major public tender from the National Institute of Hygiene "Rafael Rangel" to architect and develop their diagnostic laboratory management system, and I joined specifically to deliver that platform.
To this day, it remains one of the most intellectually and technically demanding projects of my career: I participated across the entire lifecycle, from clinical requirement discovery to production deployment, within a core development team of just two engineers.
EVAL
The laboratory information system managing patient records, diagnostic samples, and test results across the Virology, Bacteriology, and Mycology departments of the country's national public health reference institute. It has its own project case study.
I created the name and logo of the system. According to colleagues, it remains operational in production today.
What I Learned from Mission-Critical Operations
A national public health reference laboratory cannot tolerate software becoming obsolete whenever clinical protocols or diagnostic reagents change. That operational constraint forced me to design the underlying database schema with a fundamentally dynamic architecture: fully parameterizable, data-driven, and versioned. It instilled an engineering discipline I hold to this day: before drafting a schema, thoroughly interrogate what business rules will change, and at what frequency.
It was also my first intensive experience with sensitive medical data governance. We processed clinical records—including HIV-positive patient diagnoses—meaning granular role-based access control, cryptographic re-authentication for critical record modifications, and immutable audit logging were not optional luxuries, but core technical requirements.
Open Source by Legal Mandate
The platform was built on PHP and PostgreSQL in strict compliance with Presidential Decree 3390, which mandated free and open-source software across public administration. It was my first experience having regulatory compliance dictate the engineering stack—a pattern I encountered repeatedly in subsequent years with fiscal invoicing in Argentina and Chile, and labor compliance in Spain.
Corporate Web and Technical Instruction
Following project delivery, I engineered the company's corporate web portal and taught two advanced PHP courses within their certified curriculum. Teaching a language while diving deep into its internals forces a deeper conceptual mastery; it was as foundational to my engineering growth as building production software.
During this period, I also began working professionally with Photoshop and Illustrator, and completed my first 3D modeling commissions in Blender for commercial advertising materials.