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 8 years of experience. I work as a C# backend engineer. I specialize in building APIs and backend code with .NET technologies. Mostly, ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET Web API 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, so existing users can continue to work with the least amount of breaking changes. Among other things,

• I changed document creation to follow UBL standard v2.1, instead of v2.0.
• I created a library to parse pdf’s and plain-text files into xml files to feed a document API

In my free time, I like to read books (on paper) and learn and teach foreign languages.

What I write about

I’m write about learning and programming. I want to share what I have learned in my journey as a software engineer.

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

I’ve been featured in Exception Not Found as a Guest Writer. And, I wrote about learning a new language (not a programming language, a foreign language) in Fluent in 3 months.

If you’re interested, you can read how I started blogging and the story behind my first post.

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
• ASP.NET Core Guide for ASP.NET Framework Users

Tutorials

• Parsinator, a tale of a pdf parser
• Remote interview, here I go
• Postfix Notation: An Interview Exercise
• My take on the difference between Func and Action
• My take on the Pipeline pattern

Unit Testing

• Unit Testing 101: Free eBook
• How to create fakes with Moq
• How to write good unit tests

Productivity

• Just Vim It! Learning Vim For Fun and Profit
• Programs that saved you 100 hours
• Plugins and settings for my Visual Studio setup
• How I take notes

BugOfTheDay

• The query and the index When a Production database went down
• My story about a horrific debugging session

Books

• The Clean Coder
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
• The Art of Unit Testing

Thanks for reading!