Bio
Nico is part of the scaffolding of Manas: he contributes to the company’s values, the structure and the processes. It’s because of his ideas that Manas has such an innovative way of looking at work.
His long-time vision makes experimenting with processes a real possibility, and he enjoys going against average company protocol until everyone in the company is happy. His everlasting calmness in the face of experiments provides everyone with a safe environment for embracing change and working the best way they can.
He is always willing to partake in tasks which no one else enjoys and as such deals with finances and keeping the inside of the office separate from the messy outside world.
He leads both devs and leaders and helps people reach their desired roles and potential. Always careful about everyone’s happiness, he is willing to hear and respond to every opinion.
Last year’s activity
Blog Posts
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Stop being recruited
There’s a shit ton of programming work. A demand that isn’t matched by the talent pool. That creates a much larger gap in tech than in any other industry. And yet, software developers looking to do meaningful work have a hard time cutting through the... -
Stop paying for software
“There are no right answers to wrong questions.” — Ursula K. Le Guin We have been developing software for 18 years, working with companies from all corners of the world, lots of industries, and all sizes. We have learned some key lessons that fundame... -
How to analyze business performance in real-time - Automated Financial Modeling
How to analyze business performance in real-time - Automated Financial Modeling “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” We often see that quote attributed to Peter Drucker, as a justification for measuring things. He not only never actually sa... -
Decentralized expensing system
How can organizations have an efficient and streamlined process to get budget allocated and expenses approved, giving every employee autonomy and flexibility to do their best while maintaining a high degree of accountability and auditing? Getting exp... -
Salary compensations without intermediation
Over the years, people that hear about the compensation system at Manas.Tech have asked for more details or access to the software we use. It felt unresponsible to me to only share bits, without the overall context, design goals and assumptions, so i... -
Fixed scope freezes innovation
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. — Mark Twain Developing software systems -and we dare to say all systems– implies mastering the arts of uncertainty and complexity. Uncertainty,... -
How do knowledge-workers train?
Pilots can practice for real flights using simulators. Sport teams can train for real games through training matches and team exercises. Disaster responders can prepare for real-life events by running simulation exercises. Musicians can rehearse, wri... -
Harnessing information flow to empower survivors
Information is a vital form of aid in itself […] Disaster-affected people need information as much as water, food, medicine or shelter. Information can save lives, livelihoods and resources. — World Disasters Report 2005 (cross-posted at InSTEDD) Dur... -
Lecture at Mahidol
Last week I had the chance of giving a lecture with Taha in the context of an InSTEDD presentation about Machine Learning applied in Biosurveillance at the Public Health Informatics course at the Mahidol University in Bangkok. It was a great opportun... -
Visualizing multi-dimensional data
A couple of days ago we started working on a new visualization for Riff’s acitivity. The requirement was to find a way of representing the relationship between items tag with two or more tags, the users who were tagging and the evolution of the tags... -
InSTEDD-Trinity Internship wrap-up
We have finished our first internship between InSTEDD and Trinity College. Juan Pablo and Qianqian did an amazing job putting together an SVM classifier using libSVM for suggesting tags inside Riff items. They tested the implementation with Reuters d... -
9 developers in one month
It is well known in the project management world that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. This is known as Brooks’ law. An analogy is that you can’t use 9 women to make a baby in one month. A couple of days ago, at Manas we did... -
Next steps for Riff
This week a nice coincidence made possible that I met personally Taha Kass-Hout in DC. We’ve been working for InSTEDD creating a collaborative disease detection and surveillance platform with some machine learning tools. Luckily the restaurant’s tabl... -
InSTEDD Internships
Today we had the orientation presentation for an Internship that two students from Trinity College will be doing around Riff/RNA. They will be helping us build some classification tools involving machine learning with SVM’s and Bayesian classifiers a...
Projects
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Award voting platform
1 /4 Client El Ojo de Iberoamérica is an international advertisement creativity award that's been growing for the past 25 years. Behind it is LatinSpots, a media company specialized in communication, advertising, marketing, film, events and entertain... -
Connecting trucks with cargo
1 /5 Client Avancargo is an Argentinean company who seeks to optimize land transport in Latin America, by facilitating the process of finding and booking cargo vehicles through a platform that puts together supply and demand in one place, thus simpli... -
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,... -
Connected Diagnostics
1 /6 Client CDx (Connected Diagnostics initiative) is a collaborative initiative between InSTEDD and FIND that seeks to use diagnostic data to improve healthcare delivery, outbreak detection and response, and health systems management, working also a... -
Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics
1 /5 Client The RADx-rad Data Coordination Center Discovery & Diagnostics Core (RADx-rad DCC Dx Core), based at UC San Diego, is focused on closing the loop between data acquisition, structuring, analysis, data-driven modeling, decision support, impl... -
Technology that thinks like a fashion editor
1 /5 Client Everywear is the brainchild of Brandon Holley, and it’s self-defined as the first B2B technology platform to bring editorial authority to e-commerce, through personalized recommendations. What does that mean? In their CEO & founder’s own... -
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... -
Remote-controlled lighting
1 /4 Client Evolux is a chilean company specialized in efficient lighting using LED technology. They provide lighting fixtures and other equipment to various industries throughout Chile. 2 /4 Requirements & Context As a service to their clients in th... -
Helping soulmamas find each other
1 /5 Client Socialmama is a Houston based startup founded by Amanda Ducach, that aims to help mothers connect with each other. The idea for the app was born as Ducach struggled to help a friend of hers with a child’s new medical diagnosis, knowing al... -
Chatbot builder
1 /5 Client AIDA was developed by Manas.Tech and InSTEDD, in collaboration with mVAM, an innovative team at the World Food Programme (WFP), the food aid arm of the United Nations, and thanks to a grant from the Cisco Foundation and additional support... -
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... -
Docker Cloud on iOS
1 /4 Concept Tugboat offers the first mobile experience to manage Docker Cloud accounts for iPhone and iPod users. 2 /4 Requirements & Context Tugboat was developed purely because Manas’ own engineers wanted a way to manage Docker deployments from a... -
Emergency Response Design Workshop
1 /5 Client Red Cross Argentina is part of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, a referent organization in the humanitarian world, whose mission is to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for all human bei... -
Disease Visualization
1 /3 Client Developed with InSTEDD and the Task Force for Global Health in a project with the link_to 'Public Health Informations Institute', 'http://www.phii.org/', 'aria-label': 'Public Health Informations Institute' for the US Centers for Disease... -
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... -
Time management
1 /3 Concept 7 Horizons is a time management method that helps you set time aside to work on specific goals. This project was born as yet another scratch to one of our itches: since we’re constantly trying out new ways to rearrange the way we work, t... -
Unstructured Data Parsing
1 /3 Client Developed together with InSTEDD for simplifying data-reporting from users on the field, Seentags is an open-source tool that can be easily plugged into any existing web application by using simple HTTP requests, or used by itself receivin... -
Field Data Collection
1 /3 Client The DOHMH (New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s) is a government department responsible for public health in New York City, US. Within the scope and responsibilities of this department are the inspection of restaurant,... -
Crowd Micro Tasking
1 /3 Client The inspiration for TaskMeUp came from a mini-tool we developed against the clock during our response to Haiti’s earthquake, sms2geo, which allowed first-responders in Haiti to send a text message asking for a specific location and have t... -
Biomedical Signals Processing
1 /4 Client Winmap is a biomedical signals processing software. It handles ECG, EEG, EMG, audio and video, capturing and analyzing the signals in real time.It provides a set of comprehensive spectral analysis including FFT, Power Spectrum and AR Mode... -
3D Trees Generator
1 /3 Client This tool was commissioned to Manas to be part of a larger 3D universe rendering engine for a major game console manufacturer. You can read more about it in our blog. 2 /3 Approach The goal of the project was to generate 3D trees programa...