Database Administrator at Alerce Group (2006–2009), a logistics software company serving clients across Europe and South America with transport management and route optimization solutions. The beginning of the golden age of parcel delivery in Spain.

The Context #

Logistics is a trust business. Sending a package is a coordinated effort of dozens of people, every day, 24x7. Alerce was in the middle of transforming desktop applications into web services, and the databases had to keep up – handling high-volume package tracking and route calculations while the architecture underneath was being modernized.

What I Did #

Database operations. Oracle (9i, 10g) administration on Red Hat Linux. Backup and recovery procedures, performance optimization for transaction processing, monitoring and alerting. Multiple concurrent client implementations at different stages, each with customized deployments.

Data integration. Designed ETL processes integrating multiple business systems. Automated data migrations for system upgrades with validation scripts ensuring data quality. This was the work that taught me how systems talk to each other – interfaces, contracts, failure modes.

Lessons Learned #

1. Logistics teaches you what 24x7 really means. Not uptime on a dashboard – real people coordinating real packages across real borders, every day. That urgency shaped how I think about production systems.
2. ETL is where you learn interfaces. Building data integration pipelines across business systems taught me more about how software communicates than any distributed systems textbook. Every interface is a contract, and every contract breaks differently.
3. Domain knowledge matters. Working closely with people who had decades of logistics experience showed me that understanding the business is not optional – you can’t optimize what you don’t understand.