Santiago Avalos Ambroggio
Principal Engineer at Zignal Labs and assistant professor at FaMAF, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. I build software for a living and teach it on the side — or the other way around, depending on the week.
At Zignal Labs I work on SaaS tools for OSINT and media intelligence: data visualization and analysis pipelines that process billions of publicly available data points in real time and turn them into something analysts can actually use. The stack is React, Redux, Node.js, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch. The work runs the full range from feature development to technical leadership.
At FaMAF I've been teaching since 2015, across courses in algorithms, programming paradigms, and software engineering. The Software Engineering course — where we try to close the gap between what a rigorous CS degree teaches you and what a real software team actually needs — is the direct reason this blog exists. A lot of what I write here started as something I said in a lecture, and I got tired of not having a place to point students toward afterward.
Before software I studied music for fourteen years: choir direction, theory, the whole thing. The habits it builds — the discipline of deliberate practice, learning from people who are much better than you, caring about the form and not just the result — translate better to this profession than you'd expect.
Experience
- Principal Software Engineer Zignal Labs2023 – present
- Assistant Professor Universidad Nacional de Córdoba — FaMAF2015 – present
- Software Architect Admios2018 – 2023
- Co-Founder & Software Engineer Codetronics2014 – 2017
- Researcher LIIS Group, FaMAF — NLG & AI2012 – 2014
Stack
- JavaScript / TypeScript — primary language
- React + Redux — frontend
- Node.js — backend
- MongoDB / Elasticsearch — data layer
- Astro — this blog