About Me
I am Álvaro Graça. I am from Portugal, and I live in the Netherlands. I write software for a living, and I write about it here.
I studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, spent an Erasmus semester in Computer Science at the Politecnico di Torino, and then added two bootcamps on top: Data Science at Le Wagon, and MultiCloud Computing and DevOps at The Cloud Bootcamp.
Work
I am a Full Stack Engineer at TomTom in Amsterdam. I joined as an intern in December 2023 and moved to a full-time role in September 2024. Most of my work is on the developer-facing surface of the company:
- docs.tomtom.com — the public documentation portal, built with Astro, React and TypeScript. It uses Astro Content Collections for MDX, and runs on Azure behind a CDN.
- my.tomtom.com — the developer dashboard. React and TypeScript, with interactive components and analytics visualisations. It merged several separate platforms into one monorepo (Astro, pnpm, Vite, Playwright), so that a new team only has to make a workspace to get the tooling, the actions and the test frameworks.
- Self-service project access — a provisioning system on ConnectRPC/gRPC with MSAL authentication, which removed a large amount of manual work.
- Playbook UI Kit — the company-wide frontend component library. One shared space, instead of teams that do not know what the other teams built.
- cet-web-platform — a central set of reusable GitHub Actions workflows: static checks, test frameworks and third-party integrations such as Veracode and SonarQube. It removed duplicated CI/CD configuration across many repositories.
- CI/CD and infrastructure — GitHub Actions and Pulumi on Azure: blue-green deployments with Container Apps, CDN cache purges with Front Door, and OIDC authentication with Key Vault for secrets.
- Maps SDK for JavaScript — an open-source SDK on top of MapLibre. I maintain the repository, build SDK features, and work on a conversational map interface with bring-your-own-LLM integrations.
Before TomTom I certified casino and gaming software against worldwide regulations at Gaming Laboratories International, and I did a job rotation at Parfois, where I helped start their Big Data department, worked as a buyer, and worked in the stores.
Since January 2023 I also teach Data Science at Le Wagon: SQL, machine learning, deep learning, and the mathematics below them.
How I work
I follow kaizen and lean development. In practice that means small steps, clean code, and continuous improvement of the requirements and the systems that carry them. I like tools that other people can pick up without a meeting.
Languages
Portuguese and English are my working languages. I also speak Spanish, and I get by in Italian and French. My German is elementary, and it stays that way until I need it.
