About Me
I’m Álvaro Graça, a software engineer from Portugal, living in the Netherlands.
I studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, did an Erasmus semester in Computer Science at the Politecnico di Torino, and later did two bootcamps: Data Science at Le Wagon, and MultiCloud Computing and DevOps at The Cloud Bootcamp.
Work
I’m a Full Stack Engineer at TomTom in Amsterdam. I started as an intern in December 2023 and went full-time in September 2024. Most of what I do is for developers using TomTom’s products:
- docs.tomtom.com: the public documentation portal. Astro, React and TypeScript, with Content Collections for MDX, running on Azure behind a CDN.
- my.tomtom.com: the developer dashboard, in React and TypeScript. We merged several separate platforms into one monorepo (Astro, pnpm, Vite, Playwright), so a new team just adds a workspace and gets the tooling, actions and test setup.
- Self-service project access: a provisioning system on ConnectRPC/gRPC with MSAL authentication, replacing a lot of manual work.
- Playbook UI Kit: the company-wide frontend component library.
- cet-web-platform: shared GitHub Actions workflows for static checks, tests, and integrations like Veracode and SonarQube, so repos don’t each maintain their own CI/CD config.
- CI/CD and infrastructure: GitHub Actions and Pulumi on Azure, with blue-green deployments on Container Apps, CDN cache purges with Front Door, and OIDC with Key Vault for secrets.
- Maps SDK for JavaScript: an open-source SDK built on MapLibre. I maintain the repo, build features, and work on a conversational map interface where you bring your own LLM.
Before TomTom, I tested casino and gaming software against regulations at Gaming Laboratories International. Before that I did a job rotation at Parfois, where I helped set up their Big Data department and also worked as a buyer and in the stores.
Since January 2023 I’ve also taught Data Science at Le Wagon: SQL, machine learning, deep learning, and the maths behind them.
How I work
I lean towards kaizen and lean development: small steps, clean code, and improving things as I go. I like building tools other people can pick up without needing someone to explain them.
Languages
I work in Portuguese and English. I also speak Spanish, get by in Italian and French, and know some basic German.
