My name is Sergio Fernández
(aka
wikier/willy).
I'm a Spanish software engineer,
based in Vancouver
(Canada),
advocate of open technologies and ways of thinking.
I like to say that I am I and my circumstances
.
So welcome to my personal web page!
As mentioned, I'm a Software engineer with wide experience productionizing and scalling smart software systems that combine different technologies (Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, Machine Learning or Big Data, among others). Currently I'm applying all my engineering expertise to a larger scale at Amazon, the Earth's most customer-centric company.
In the past I've worked at some of the finest applied research institutes in Europe: more than six years as research assistant at CTIC (Spain), visiting DERI (Ireland) in 2008, and as a Senior Researcher at Salzburg Research in Austria in 2012. Contributing in this time as expert in numerous large-scale European research projects and standardization bodies such as the W3C. After that I tried to bring some of those results to the market as co-founder of a startup in Austria: Redlink.
Since my time in college, I have always been passionate about open software technologies, free software or open source, the way you prefer to call it. Long gone are the days of AsturLiNUX when we wanted to change the world from a modest LUG. But the spirit remains. So it is no surprise that most of my development work is available in several open source projects, and especially at the Apache Software Foundation, of which I'm Member.
My other passion remains teaching. So whenever I have the chance I love to organize talks, workshops or meetups to share ideas and simply talk tech. I have also been sporadically lecturing at universities and other education centers.
Disclaimer: this is my personal website, so all the opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers.
Ocasionally I write in a blog those writing I find interesting to share. But I don't keep it as updated as I used to do, so you can refer to my twitter to get freshest information.
Although Google Scholar does a great work gathering my publications, here I manually maintain a list with all of them:
Due my research activities, I participated in large-scale European research projects as well as in W3C standarization groups. But this list doesn't refer to those projects, but software projects I developed, of course pretty related with my research. You can check at ohloh some of my contributions to other open source projects.
In the development of these projects I collaborate with many people: Diego Berrueta, Iván Mínguez, Carlos Tejo, Miguel García, Jose María Álvarez, Iván Frade, Jose E. Labra, Ivan Herman, John Breslin, Uldis Bojars, Stéphane Corlosquet, Richard Cyganiak, Sebastian Schaffert, Rupert Westenthaler, Jakob Frank, Thomas Kurz, Rafa Haro, among others...