Pablo Carrillo is a leading figure in Calvium’s team of expert developers. He has led projects in a wide set of technologies including mobile, full stack development, dev ops and cloud computing. Pablo joined Calvium as a junior developer back in 2014, and through his passion and knowledge for all things mobile, he quickly gained the skills and experience to become our in-house iOS specialist. With additional team responsibilities and expanding expertise in a growing number of technologies, he has achieved his current position as Technical Delivery Manager.

During his time at Calvium, Pablo has developed apps for a wealth of clients including Yodel and Rolls-Royce, and worked on key projects including Tower Bridge for City of London, Háblame Bebé, Open Bionics and the award-winning Place Experience Platform. He holds a five-year degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Seville, though his love of technology began long before that…

Where did your interest in technology begin and what motivates you professionally?

I have always liked to know how things work. I used to disassemble all of my toys and put them back together to see how the moving parts worked. Then games consoles came into my life and I started tinkering with computers…it was during my degree that I learned more about computers and smartphones, which is how I’m here today. 

This inner nerd in me loves to learn new things and explore new technologies to see how they can be improved. It is very satisfying when you finally find a successful solution to a difficult issue – and even better when it brings a positive change to the world we live in.

One example was when I worked on part of the SAFinity clean energy project for Rolls-Royce, which aims to support and accelerate the availability and use of Sustainable Aviation Fuel in the aviation industry. Given the industry, the security of the whole system needed to be really strong. It was a real challenge to implement the necessary security thoroughly through the infrastructure side of the project, but equally satisfying when we developed a solution. Knowing something has the potential to make a positive difference to our world certainly fuels that motivation.

What aspects of client work do you find most satisfying?

It’s great to do things that fulfil a positive purpose or are useful to people; seeing the look on clients’ faces when one of their ideas becomes a reality is a real perk of the job.

One of our projects, Háblame Bebé, is a great example of this. The idea for the app came from Professor Melissa Baralt, whose psycholinguistic research involves working in daycare centres in Florida, home to some of the largest Hispanic communities in the US. She found daycare care-providers were speaking to children in English, the second language of many of the families. She also found many Hispainic mothers had experienced linguistic racism when they spoke to their babies in Spanish. Parents felt they shouldn’t talk to their own children in their native language, which was limiting their language skills, neurological development and future opportunities.

We worked with Melissa to develop an interactive language learning app to help Hispanic mothers speak to their children in Spanish, and encourage them to have pride in their bilingualism. The project has a very direct real-world positive outcome, supporting mother/child bonds in families, and that is lovely to see.

I also really value building strong, trusted relationships with clients – like Melissa –  who share your own values, and who are united in genuinely wanting to make a positive impact on people, place and planet. This helps to create genuinely meaningful work.

What do you most enjoy in your day to day operational experience?

You can learn a lot from people and they can bring a different perspective, which helps to ensure we are always learning and improving skills, knowledge and technology. Collectively, we try to evaluate and reflect on internal processes, looking at how to be smoother and what technologies that can support that to happen.

For instance, when we reviewed our technical workflow management and decided to move from Phabricator to Gitlab, we were investigating options for some time. There was a whole journey of testing, informing and writing processes to ensure a smooth transition. This change has meant we now use continuous integration (CI) across all our projects; we are continually improving our tools and processes.

Alongside this shared desire to improve and evolve, we are all very focused on wanting to make a positive change to the world. As a team, we try to make conscious choices and are rigorous in our decision-making; for example, as part of our SME Climate Hub commitment and BCorp application, we are now monitoring the climate credentials of tools and our supply chain.

Everyone in Calvium cares and is working towards the same goal, and being a part of that culture is really motivating.

What technology developments have inspired you recently?

I have been working recently with Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to help with delivering very fast websites and large data applications. It’s been interesting to find out how they work with the latest version of NextJS, which is the platform that we use to build the PEP Web App.

Using a good CDN and cache strategy can help us to lower our carbon and energy footprint by needing fewer resources to deliver the same, or an even better experience to our users.

One focus we have when developing at Calvium is how we can make our products use less resources, either by using less data or minimising the computational requirements. This can mean that our products and applications can run on older or less powerful devices, which saves energy and extends the useful lifespan of devices, resulting in less device waste.

If we are thinking about innovating for people, place and planet, what excites you about the latest developments and future of digital technologies?

In general, it is great to see people are becoming more conscious about the environment, and hopefully legislation is coming in to force people to look into that – particularly with regard to mobile devices. All of this will help to bring more innovation.

Thinking about specific projects, we have been working for some time now on a really cool project called Envirocrops, which is an innovative clean energy tool to help farmers evaluate crops to produce biomass and therefore reduce the use of fossil fuels.

The free web app is filled with data that allows farmers, landowners and researchers etc to compare the suitability of growing crops on different land sites, as well as offering insights into the potential profitability of biomass. 

I love working on innovations like this as they have a genuinely meaningful role to play in supporting the transition to Net Zero.

How does the team investigate new technologies and collaborate to produce the best work?

I work closely with our chief technical officer, Ben, to initially define internal standards around how to develop software solutions and internal tools and processes to ensure technical quality. We then try to get a clear picture from the client about their need and try to break it down into smaller tasks for the team. We keep a log of tasks so we can track the development process within the dev team, whilst collaborating with the design and project management team on delivery.

It really helps that we have robust quality and security processes in place, such as ISO accreditation and Cyber Essentials Plus certification, as it means we are all working to high technical standards and we are aligned across teams.

Although obtaining these certifications is a challenge and a big investment on time and resources from me and the rest of the team, as a tech team leader these processes give me extra confidence that we can deliver to our clients and customers to the highest standards.

What does good technical leadership look like and what advice can you share with other dev teams?

Listen to people. If you are leading a team, listening is key to supporting teams to perform well. It facilitates communication and collaboration and allows people to perform to the best of their ability. If your team performs well, everything is easier. 

We also run weekly tech talks to encourage people to share learnings, which is a really effective way to improve knowledge and skills across the team.

Keeping a calm, positive attitude is key; when challenges come up, a good attitude helps us to find solutions without blaming individuals. Instead, we learn from our mistakes and improve our processes so those mistakes do not happen again.

Thanks Pablo for sharing your experience and insight!