About

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

What I do

I’m an independent 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’ve worked in public services, electronic invoicing, and reservation management as a full-time employee and independent contractor.

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

• I changed the document creation component 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 share what I’ve learned in my journey as a software engineer. Often, I consider my blog as my own time capsule.

In this blog, you’ll find tools I use, issues I’ve solved, lessons I’ve learned the hard way, and success and failure stories.

If you’re interested, this is the story of how I started blogging and what I’ve 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

Starting out or already on the coding journey? Join my free 7-day email course to refactor your software engineering career now – I distill 10+ years of career lessons into 7 short emails.

Thanks for reading!