About

I’m Cesar Aguirre. I’m a software engineer, lifelong learner, language enthusiast, and vivid reader.

What I do

I’m a software engineer based in Colombia (not Columbia) with more than 10 years of experience (I stopped counting). I work remotely as a backend engineer and technical writer. I specialize in building APIs and backend code with .NET technologies. Mainly C#, ASP.NET Core, and SQL Server these days.

What I’ve done

I have worked in public services, electronic invoicing, and reservation management.

In electronic invoicing, I updated a platform to comply with the latest regulations from the Colombian government. Existing users continued to work with the least amount of breaking changes. Among other things,

• I changed document creation to follow the latest standard for XML business documents.
• I created a library to parse PDFs and plain-text files into XML files to feed a documents API.

What I write about

I write about learning and programming. I want to share what I have learned in my journey as a software engineer. Often, I consider my blog as my own time capsule.

In this blog, you can find tips and advice, libraries I use, issues I have solved, lessons learned the hard way, success and failure stories.

I’ve been featured in Exception Not Found as a Guest Writer. And, I’ve written for SaaS companies like Alachisoft.

If you’re interested, this is how I started blogging and what I learned after five years of blogging.

Fun facts

I’m a cat owner, vim user, plain-text lover, and Zettelkasten practitioner.

In my free time, I like to read books (on paper) and learn foreign languages. Currenlty, I’m learning Brazilian Portuguese. (Oi, gente! Tudo bem?)

Start here

If you don’t know where to start reading or if you want to find something to read, head to any of these posts:

Guides

• The C# Definitive Guide
• Git Guide For TFS Users
• A Quick Guide to LINQ with Examples

Tutorials

• Remote interviewing: Types and Tips
• My take on the difference between Func and Action
• My series on C# idioms

Unit Testing

• How to name unit tests: Four naming conventions
• How to create test data with Builders
• What fakes are in unit testing: mocks vs stubs

Productivity

• Just Vim It! Learning Vim For Fun and Profit
• Plugins and settings for my Visual Studio C# setup
• How I take notes

BugOfTheDay

• The Slow Room Search
• Searching Reservations is timing out

Books

• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
• How to Take Smart Notes
• Ultralearning

Follow me on dev.to, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

To support my work, check my courses, download my ebooks, and buy me a coffee.

Thanks for reading!