Gerard's Blog

Fred again.. & Thomas Bangalter

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Really wish I could have been there.

AI vs Mosquito

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mosquito or all of AI?

Agentic coding

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting interview to Claude Code creator. Really interesting and unique insights on how agents are shaping our work.

On simplicity

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A good reminder given the current day and age we live in…

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

To new beginnings

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve decided to start writing again. To be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of writing in general; when I was young, it was the task I dreaded most. However, I’ve come to a place where I realize there is value in sharing —or at least capturing— some of the thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head.

Especially now, in the age of AI, human writing feels like both an underestimated effort and a uniquely valuable pursuit that requires real dedication.

Scaling ML Serving to 1000s of Models

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My talk at DASH on scaling ML model serving infrastructure to handle thousands of models in production.

AIP-31: Airflow functional DAG definition

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My talk at Airflow Summit 2020 on AIP-31, proposing explicit message passing between tasks in Airflow DAGs and a new task decorator for custom Python transformations.

Social Media Analysis for Crisis Informatics in the Cloud

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My MS thesis at University of Colorado Boulder on designing cloud-based software infrastructure for analyzing social media data during natural disasters and crisis events.

HackAssistant: A Hackathon Registration Platform

Sat, 06 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Managing hackers applications is probably the worst nightmare hackathon organizers have. For this reason, after struggling with applications during HackUPC Fall 2016, I decided to use my knowledge to build a tool to make it easier: HackAssistant. Now it’s deployed for HackCU at my.hackcu.org.

At the beginning, we built a really simple system that performed the following tasks:

Easy and scalable application review process for organizers: Allow all organizers to review hackers applications and provide feedback. This makes the review process more scalable. The system handles applications queue’s for each organizer and normalizes the score per reviewer.
Automatic invite and confirm emails: Make invite process simpler for organizers by allowing to send invites from the same interface. Confirmation, expiration and last reminders are all managed by the system.
Check-in platform: QR code scanner and manual search check in interfaces. This allows to have multiple check-in tables without a hassle. With the confirmation email, hackers receive a QR code that when scanned checks them in.

It was quite simple. Me and the HackUPC WebDev team started coding it on December 2016. Now, after a year of additions, patches, refactors, new features, lots of bugs… we are releasing a new version. This version is the one that will be used to manage applications for HackCU IV as well.

Hackathons: my story on motivation and learning

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I started writing a small article about HackCU’s registration platform. However, I realized that there was no context. I started to write the context and ended up with this. Hope you enjoy it!

Around two years ago, I joined for the first time an organizational meeting for the first edition of HackUPC. It was fantastic… I felt stupid.

It all started because a friend of mine mentioned that she was helping organize a local hackathon. I immediately felt jealous. That sounded so cool. I asked her to introduce me to whoever was running it. And so, after a couple of meetings and insisting a lot, I was in.

Big data analytics on container-orchestrated systems

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My BSc thesis at UPC Barcelona on migrating big data analytics infrastructure to container-orchestrated systems, showing improved scalability, reduced maintenance costs, and easier reliability.

The Third Option

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Someone told me that life is like a tree. You start from a branch, at the beginning of the tree and every single time you decide, the tree splits in different and alternatives options. There’s some point on your life where you have to make a lot of important choices. Decisions that will mark your life, that will make the difference between what you are and what you will become. They are like the big branches of the tree. Sometimes we have a clear vision of what we want to do, what to choose, what branch to take. Other times we just don’t know. This is when we usually find ourselves trapped in what we call Dilemmas.