About me

My name is Teo Ruiz. I am a software engineer, CTO, and entrepreneur. I’ve been building software products for 20 years.

I was born on a random afternoon in November 1983 in southern Spain, and since then I’ve been, essentially, learning. I currently live in Madrid.

In Sevilla, my hometown.
In Sevilla, my hometown.
iPhone 14 Pro | ƒ/1.90 | 1/55s | ISO 320

Projects

Over the past ~20 years, I’ve been lucky enough to work on great projects with great people:

  • I co-maintained a Debian-based distribution (while being an official Debian maintainer).
  • I was the first employee, founding member of the engineering team, and VP of Engineering at FON.
  • I managed the web development team at El País, one of the biggest newspapers in Spain.
  • I was CTO at Busuu, the world’s largest language learning startup by number of users.
  • I headed the engineering team at Lyst in London.
  • I was VP of Engineering at Jobandtalent.
  • For five years, I was a Co-Founder at Circular. We tried to fix the recruiting problem for candidate-driven industries, starting with tech and product recruiting for startups. We sold the company to Sngular in 2024.

You can see my full CV and contact me on LinkedIn.

Interests

In tech, I like free software (free as in free speech), DevOps, systems and infrastructure engineering (especially on AWS and GCP), scalability, databases, automation, coding for fun and profit, the startup scene, and in general being geeky about technical things.

In Real Life, I like music, music, music, and then some other stuff (randomly sorted, ridiculously non-comprehensive list): writing, traveling, politics, quality alcoholic beverages, coffee, hanging out with my friends, food, photography, economics, reading, movies, and running.

Languages and writing

Spanish is my mother tongue, but I have a crush on the English language, so some of the posts on this old blog were written (some would say committed) in that language. Please bear with me.

Python is my preferred language for everything else, although I’ve had the doubtful pleasure of working with PHP for a few years. The Go language has recently risen to the top of my toolbox ranking, and I try to use it for new projects.

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