Alejandro Garcia Fernandez

Alejandro García

I’m a software developer, CS teacher and Entrepreneur with experience creating small tech companies. I love leading small focused teams to achieve success and I also love teaching introduction to programming to high school, college and graduated students.

When I was young and arrogant, in the year 2000, together with a few friends we started the first software company in our home state of Zacatecas, México. Early on we realized that the waterfall model we were taught in college wasn't good enough to deliver projects on time and with high quality. That leads to study Extreme Programming and to be agile before "agile was cool". In those days being agile / extreme programming was mistaken to mean undisciplined and chaotic. How times have changed!

Unfortunately we learned all we could from books and other sources but we lacked a mentor, someone we could turn to for advice in implementing agile methodologies, even practices. How could one work with TDD? We had to wait for Kent Beck's book on the subject. That lack of support made me realize the importance of mentors, in accelerating one's success when implementing scrum.

After spending 4 years in the US developing software with programmers much smarter than me (http://omniti.com/).

I returned home to México, where I started a Master Degree in Software Engineering (http://www.ingsoft.info/posgrados/mis/). During my studies I was challenged to create a new company from the begining, this time I took the challenge with much more humility and experience, plus the world had changed now there is the Scrum Alliance in which we could train software developers and so we did and happy to report that the company 4 years laters is still going strong (http://www.softlogik.mx/).

Now I'm a teacher trying to be for my college students the mentor I wish I had when I started my small company.