Who

I’m Marcos Sánchez. I work as a Site Reliability Engineer at Chess.com, from Madrid. Before that I spent six years at Atani, now defunct, building the real-time plumbing of a crypto exchange: order books from thirty venues, billions of messages a day, microseconds that mattered. Most of what I know about systems I learned there, at 03:00, from things that had broken.

Why this site exists

Three reasons, in the order they occurred to me.

The first is my future self. I keep understanding things (how an air conditioner works, how a compacted topic behaves under retention) and then losing them a few months later. Writing it down with the numbers attached is the only way I’ve found to keep it. Half of the posts here are notes to the me of next summer.

The second is friends. A couple of them, junior and mid-level, asked me to help them look for work in 2026, and I found out how bad the procedure is. jobctl.net came out of that. So did the habit of writing things I’d otherwise explain three times over coffee.

The third is the Internet I grew up on. I learned this trade from blogs and message boards written by people who had something to say and took the trouble to say it. That web is getting harder to find under the filler. I can’t fix that, but I can put one more page on it that a person wrote, on purpose, and stand behind every number in it.

What I believe, more or less

Grudges are good fuel. Firefox took RSS away, RAM is priced like it’s mined by hand, job boards throw their history away every Thursday. Every tool I’ve released started as one of those, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.

Don’t throw the data away. Keep the event log, keep the raw bytes, keep the twelve-year-old repository. The question you’ll want to ask next year needs the data you’d throw away today, and most of what I build is some form of “remember what you saw and be able to replay it”.

Testimony isn’t evidence. “It works on my machine” is a claim; a receipt written by the machine is a fact. This site looks like an RFC memo because I like the aesthetic, but also because a memo states what it measured and how, and I’d like the writing here to be held to that.

Boring technology, on purpose. One binary, one database, a compose file on a machine in my homelab. The innovation tokens go on the one idea a project is about, never on the stack.

Agents are real tools and slop is real pollution, and both things are true at once. I use them heavily, I read what they produce, and I sign it. What I won’t do is pass their writing off as mine.

Beyond the terminal

I speak Spanish natively, English well, Portuguese passably and Chinese at HSK4, which is enough to be misunderstood in four languages. There is a homelab in the house that has opinions about disk. In 2026 I finished an Arkanoid clone I started in 2014.

Now

As of August 2026.

• Adding sources to jobctl.net one evening at a time, and waiting for its history to be old enough to say something.
• Running rpkv against my own topics and finding out what breaks.
• Writing here more than I used to.

Contact

contact@sonirico.dev, or gpg@sonirico.dev with this key if it matters. Details of where I’ve worked are on the career page.