Bio
It’s remarkably hard to find an excellent software development generalist that also excels at several specialties. Martin is one of those rare finds. As one of our best User Experience designers, he consistently advocates for putting the needs of end users first. Martín is also a great software developer with almost two decades of experience. His master thesis was on Cardiac Arrhythmia simulations. Lately, he has become interested in Deep Learning and spent some time writing a Matlab-inspired library for Crystal.
Martín is an honest friend, a good listener and is always willing to take more than his share of effort for the team. Those qualities make him an excellent team leader and project manager, another of the roles he plays with mastery.
When not juggling the many roles he enjoys at Manas, he can be found studying classical piano or playing volleyball for his club in Amsterdam.
Last year’s activity
Blog Posts
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Balkan Ruby 2025: in defense of slow
Some weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at Balkan Ruby 2025 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference, which had Building for the long term as its theme, took place in the WTC Interpred building—a venue that matched the event’s cozy, unhurried vibe. -
Announcing the Noir Debugger
Noir Debugger Released! What is Noir? Noir is an open source Domain Specific Language for safe and seamless construction of privacy-preserving Zero-Knowledge programs, developed by Aztec Labs. ZK programs are programs that can generate short proofs o... -
Why Crystal CodeCamp?
Maybe you’ve heard: we’re organizing the first Crystal CodeCamp in San Francisco on May 11th and 12th. But, why are we doing this? During the last few years, Crystal has been making the rounds at the front pages of Reddit Programming and Hacker News... -
Using CircleCI for your Crystal projects
We linked to a gist with the circle.yml example described in this post from Crystal’s wiki. One of the first things we do when we bootstrap a project at Manas is to set up a continuous integration server. Since in general we use GitHub, for open sour... -
A flying-robots workshop at Singularity University
This past April, Waj, Nico and I flew to San Francisco to facilitate an InSTEDD-hosted workshop to explore innovative uses of UAVs for disaster management, supported by Cisco. Aim at the moon, they say, so we set ourselves up for a strong start by ru... -
It’s not a drugstore
Agile methodologies. Lean Startup. Lean UX. Agile UX. User centered design. Human centered design. Mobile first. Responsive design. Today’s January 12th, 2015. If you’re reading this a week from now, chances are you’ll be able to add the next buzzwor... -
Reuse code, not user experience
Let’s face it: as a developer, I’m lazy. I just want to write just enough code. What is more, I want to reuse it whenever possible. I want it to be abstract. If I’m asked to implement a view which needs a sortable grid, one of those whose rows you ca... -
Don’t make me think... nor work more than I’m supposed to
Don’t make me think is a great book about usability and interaction design written by Steve Krug. One of the best things about it is that Steve has used the very same principles he preaches at in his book in the design of its reading experience. The... -
Upgrading to Rails 3: @routes is nil
I’m currently in the process of upgrading an application from Rails 2 to Rails 3. Fortunately, it’s not the first time someone does so, and there’s plenty of resources throughout the web that will help you to work it out. In particular, I chose to fo... -
Contratos de alcance opcional: una traducción de "Optional Scope Contracts", de Kent Beck y Dave Cleal
Rápido, sin pensar demasiado, decime cuántos de los últimos diez proyectos de desarrollo de software que encaraste (como proveedor o como cliente) terminaron en la fecha convenida, con el 100% de los features implementados. ¿Hay alguno? Si tuviste el... -
Install the RMagick gem in the painless way with Homebrew
Introduction Disclaimer: this section is just happy talking, if you want to get right to the beef, skip it and go right to the beef. Yesterday was a sad day for me. It wasn’t meant to be like that. I began the day with the intention of setting up a d... -
How do I unit-test a class which depends on HttpContext?
Suppose you have to fix a bug in an ASP.NET application. You’re a TDD-guy so once you identify it, you write a test which should reproduce it. Then you run it and… null pointer exception. Your testing framework may have pointed you to the exact line,... -
Neyun is here!
I’m glad to announce the first Beta Release of Neyun has been oficially launched! Neyun is a web application which lets you navigate and query through all your pictures, emails, messages, videos and links, no matter if they come from your RSS feeds o... -
Programming paradigms and correctness
For many, programming nowadays means writing some code in an object oriented programming language such as C#, Java or C++ at a lower level. Well, those are the mainstream languages nowadays and the reigning paradigm is the object oriented one. What i... -
Silverlight 2 RTM problem with Internet Explorer 6 and GZip compression: a workaround if you’re using Jetty
We are developing a Silverlight application since some months ago. As you may know, an RTM of Silverlight 2 has been released recently, so we decided to migrate our project to it. Surprisingly, it stopped to work in IE 6 after the migration. The exce... -
OneDay Santander at Microsoft Argentina on 09/15/2008
Last Monday I had the opportunity to join Brian Cardiff at OneDay Santander to give a conference on ASP.NET and Ajax. OneDay Santander was an event organized by Microsoft Argentina attended by Banco Santander’s IT team. It was a great experience, whi... -
Positioning a Google Map according to a set of coordinates
The Google Maps API provides a number of methods to make it easier to accomplish this task. One only has to take the time to explore them and think how to combine them to get the solution. It’s not a hard thing to do, but in case you’re a lazy guy, h... -
Debugging a deployed GWT application from Eclipse
I know I promised a mini DEVS model for this post. But I bumped into this interesting thing and I wanted to share it. We are currently working on a JSF web application which has a GWT component in it. To debug the app, we have to compile the GWT comp... -
Discrete Event Simulation and the DEVS formalism
Just to gather new tools to help me in my M. Sc. thesis, I’m taking a course on Discrete Event Simulation. This course in fact is not as general as its name may suggest. It focuses mainly on modelling with a formalism called DEVS (which stands for Di... -
Integrating JSF, RichFaces and GWT (Part 2)
In the first part of the article, we showed how to let a JSF bean drive a GWT module through an exposed JavaScript API. Now we’ll see how to make a GWT module raise events in a way such that a call to the server is made letting it respond accordingly... -
Integrating JSF, RichFaces and GWT (Part 1)
Since some time ago, there seems to be a fight between two “philosophies” as regards web applications. Each philosophy has its own representatives amongst the various frameworks or platforms we can select to help us develop our app. On one hand there...
Projects
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IVR App Builder
1 /7 Client InSTEDD (innovative support to emergencies diseases & disasters) is a non-profit organization focused on improving global health and safety by implementing a blend of social and technical approaches. InSTEDD works closely with communities... -
Multi-modal survey tool
1 /6 Client Surveda was developed in collaboration with InSTEDD as part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative NCD Mobile Phone Survey. In the context of this project, the tool collects critical information about noncommunicable d... -
Service location optimization
1 /5 Client PlanWise is a tool developed by Concern’s Innovations initiative, in partnership with InSTEDD. It helps planners and responders in low-resources settings see how they can serve as many people as possible, as cost-effectively as they can,... -
Debugging zero-knowledge proof blockchains
1 /6 Partner Aztec is building a groundbreaking blockchain platform that prioritizes privacy by design. Their goal is to enable secure, private transactions without exposing user identities or transaction details. To achieve this, Aztec employs Zero-... -
Maximizing operation rooms utilization in healthcare
1 /4 Client Wúru is a health-analytics provider, whose platform leverages data and algorithms to enhance the productivity of healthcare providers and create better experiences for patients. Founded in 2019 and led by Luciano Tourn, their platform fee... -
Data-Driven Healthcare Delivery
1 /5 Client Wúru is a health-analytics provider, whose platform leverages data and algorithms to enhance the productivity of healthcare providers and create better experiences for patients. Founded in 2019 and led by Luciano Tourn, their platform fee... -
Tracking Health Status
1 /4 Client Health Check was developed in partnership with InSTEDD for the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine of the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), to keep track of the wellbeing of federal employees that were traveling fro... -
Perfect gifts, every time
1 /5 Client The idea for Dearduck came to founder Katy Aucoin as a realization: gift giving was supposed to be a beautiful, fun and thoughtful thing, and instead most people experienced it as an awkward and uncomfortable process, filled with anxiety... -
Head-up display for spacesuit
1 /5 Client The Austrian Space Forum, in Innsbruck, defines itself as a network of space professionals and people with a passion for space. One of its members, Dr. Gernot Groomer, has had a lifelong dream: finding life in outer space. Not too ambitio... -
Time tracking
1 /4 Concept Brium tracks the time each member of your team spends on different activities, by asking them through chat what they are doing. A couple of words a day is all it needs to provide your company with accurate timesheets. 2 /4 Requirements &... -
Diagnostics Visualization
1 /4 Client Cepheid is a worldwide molecular diagnostics company which manufactures, among others, the GeneXpert family of systems: accurate yet easy-to-use machines which automate testing for organisms and genetic-based diseases. Thanks to the agile... -
Aboriginal Inclusion
1 /3 Client Aboriginal Head Start Initiative, is a program of the Government of Canada for helping enhance child development and school readiness of aboriginal children living in urban centres and large northern communities. Learn more about this ini... -
SMS Group Chat
1 /3 Client GeoChat is a flexible open source group communications technology developed for InSTEDD, that lets team members interact to maintain shared geospatial awareness of who is doing what where over any device, on any platform, over any network... -
Immunization Tracking
1 /3 Client Inmuniversia is an open source platform for providing information on vaccines and the diseases they prevent, and subscribing to vaccination reminders, developed by InSTEDD iLab América Latina. 2 /3 Approach Parents can get information in...