bruno fernandez-ruiz

I am currently the architect for the Yahoo! Platform Technology Group (mobile, geo, content, video, social, analytics, …). Prior to that, I was the Chief Architect for Yahoo! International Engineering. I am a technologist with an entrepreneurial spirit. I enjoy the creative kick in solving known and unknown business challenges with technology.

I am the founder of two mobile IM startups, both of which I exited (at 50/50 success rate). I’ve contributed some code and patches to JBoss, Mono, Apache Xalan-J, and used to maintain my own little pet open source project, Caffeine, a hosted JVM for the .NET CLR. As you can guess, I like coding. Actually, I don’t think you can be a software architect without coding.

I started with a good old Sinclair ZX Spectrum my dad bought me when I was 9. It had a built-in BASIC interpreter, nice colours and plenty of weird sounds. The computer was designed to play, and all you could do with it was play. It would power up, show a black screen, then a copyright on a white background, and finally you would get a prompt “>” where to type “load” and start the tape.

Loading a game, any game, would take anything between 3 and 5 minutes, and most frequently the load would fail right at the end of the tape – back to the white screen. Games, really, were not cool (funny thing is I have never ever since played any games on a computer – I get so bored!).

I got tired of playing the load-the-tape-game-to-reboot, I started exploring the machine instructions in the zx81 processor, playing with PEEKing and POKEing. Wow, what a difference it made. Fun, fun, fun! The little Sinclair had suddenly become a creativity tool. And from there on, I was hooked into software development. Honestly, I am extremely grateful to my parents for opening the doors to what was to become my career.

The opinions expressed here are my own personal perspectives and do not necessarily reflect or represent my employer’s view.