Upcoming talk at Postgres MetroPlex Dallas — April 2026 What is CDC? Change Data Capture (CDC) is a set of software design patterns used to determine and track the data that has changed so that action can be taken using the changed data. Instead of traditional polling (which is slow and adds load to the database), CDC allows us to stream every INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE as it happens, with sub-second latency. ...
In late 2019, the Java world was buzzing with a new name: Quarkus. Promising “Supersonic Subatomic Java,” it aimed to fix the long startup times and heavy memory usage that had plagued traditional Java applications in the age of containers and serverless. At that time, Quarkus was still in its BETA phase, but the vision was clear. It wasn’t just another framework; it was a fundamental rethink of how we build Java applications for Kubernetes. ...
In the world of modern data architectures, Change Data Capture (CDC) has become a cornerstone for building reactive, event-driven systems. At the heart of this movement is Debezium, a distributed platform that turns your existing databases into event streams. Joining the Stream In July 2020, I had the opportunity to contribute to the Debezium project. My involvement came at a time when I was deeply immersed in building real-time data pipelines and realized the power of capturing row-level changes without overloading the source databases. ...
Looking back at my career, one of the most rewarding chapters was the time I spent as a Linux Administration instructor at Fundación Código Libre Dominicano. This journey began in 2006, following what the foundation recognized as an “outstanding study” period where I deeply immersed myself in the world of Unix-like systems. By 2007, I transitioned from student to instructor, a role I would hold until 2012. Building the Foundation Teaching at FCLD wasn’t just about showing people how to use a terminal; it was about fostering a mindset of freedom and technical sovereignty. My students were often professionals or aspiring sysadmins looking to break away from proprietary stacks and embrace the power of the GPL. ...
Local development against AWS services has always been painful. You either run real AWS (expensive, slow, requires an internet connection) or use an emulator. For years, LocalStack was the go-to choice — until they required auth tokens and locked down their community edition in early 2026. That gap is exactly what Floci fills. Key Numbers: Native Floci vs LocalStack Metric Native Floci LocalStack Advantage Startup Time ~24 ms ~3,300 ms 138× faster Idle Memory ~13 MiB ~143 MiB 91% less Lambda Latency 2 ms avg 10 ms avg 5× faster Lambda Throughput 289 req/s 120 req/s 2.4× faster Price Free Forever Auth Token Req. $0 / No Auth What Is Floci? Floci is a free, open-source local AWS service emulator written in Java using Quarkus and compiled to a native binary via GraalVM Mandrel. It runs as a single process on port 4566 — the same port LocalStack uses — so switching requires zero changes to your existing code or tooling. ...
Talk presented at the Java Dominicano Monthly Talks — October 2024 The Importance of Automation In this edition of the Java Dominicano Monthly Talks, we revisited the concept of IaC for everyone. The premise is simple: infrastructure as code is not exclusive to Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) or DevOps experts; it is an essential skill for every modern software developer. Why should you use IaC? Deployment Speed: Go from taking hours to having an environment ready in seconds. Living Documentation: Your infrastructure is the code, not an outdated document. Consistency: Eliminate the “it works on my machine” problem at the infrastructure level as well. The Ecosystem Tools During the session, we compared three different approaches to managing cloud resources (using DigitalOcean as an example): ...
Talk and workshop presented at JConf Dominicana — July 2024 What is IaC? Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a fundamental practice in DevOps and modern system administration. It involves managing and provisioning infrastructure through human-readable configuration files, rather than through manual processes or graphical interfaces. Key Benefits: Code Versioning: Store your infrastructure in Git. Replicability: Create identical environments (Dev, QA, Prod) consistently. Speed: Deploy servers and networks in seconds. Cost Reduction: Avoid human errors and forgotten/zombie resources. Why “for everyone”? IaC is often thought to be exclusively for large cloud architectures. However, automation principles are useful at any scale: from setting up a personal server to deploying complex clusters. If you have to install, configure, or back up something more than once, you should be using IaC. ...
Workshop presented at PUCMM — November 2023. Co-presented with Freddy Peña. Overview In this workshop, we explored how the Java ecosystem has evolved to allow developers to build modern, highly interactive, and scalable web applications without the traditional complexity of managing separate frontend and backend stacks. The focus was on Vaadin Flow, a framework that enables building web UIs 100% in Java, running on the server side while automatically handling the synchronization with the browser. ...
Talk given at BarCamp Dominican Republic — November 2020 What Is Ansible? Ansible® is an open source, command-line IT automation tool written in Python. It can: Configure systems — install packages, manage services, edit config files Deploy software — push application releases across fleets of servers Orchestrate advanced workflows — rolling upgrades, multi-tier deployments, system updates What makes Ansible stand out is that it is agentless — it communicates with target nodes over standard protocols: ...
Talk given at JConf Dominicana — July 2019 What Is Quarkus? Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native Java stack designed for GraalVM and OpenJDK HotSpot, crafted from the best Java libraries and standards. Created by Red Hat License Apache License v2.0 Version at time of talk 1.0.0.CR2 The tagline says it all: Supersonic Subatomic Java — startup times measured in milliseconds, memory footprints measured in megabytes. GraalVM — The Engine Behind Native Compilation GraalVM is a universal virtual machine capable of running JavaScript, Python, Ruby, R, Java, all JVM-based languages, and LLVM-based languages like C and C++. ...