Meet the team - Carlos Precioso

We are excited to announce that we've grown the team! 🐝 This means we can ship more features and push the framework forward with more speed.

Today, we're introducing Carlos, who recently joined us as a framework engineer. Through this interview, you'll get to know more about his interests and what drew him to join Wasp.

Let’s start with two truths and a lie about yourself.

1. I was entered into a baby model agency and had a professional photo book done.
2. I’m a chair expert and can name most of the ones you might see in a museum.
3. I won a hackathon for making innovative sex toy tech.

Which statement was the lie above? Any interesting stories to share?

I’m not a chair expert! I come from an industrial design background, and the education was very heavy on studying the history of chairs. But I forgot a lot, so I can recognize some of the most famous ones, just please don’t ask me to name them 😅.

However if anyone who reads this is missing some Spanish-language chair content in their life, I can recommend this TikTok account.

This is a cool one we had in my faculty! Uncomfortable af though.

Unfortunately, both the other stories were one-offs. But if we ever meet in person, I’ll show you the picture they took of me simulating this classic Bill Gates photo when I was nine.

Editor’s Note: The original image is way cuter! Do ask Carlos to show it to you!

Why did you join Wasp? What did you do before?

I started programming when I was around eight years old, but only as a hobby. I actually did my studies in Industrial Design, and while I lived in the Netherlands I was working as a teacher assistant on one of the more tech-focused courses. That was when I discovered that I was good at understanding what other people need from a specific tool or process, even across people from different cultural and professional background. And that I just really needed doing that from a tech position rather than a design one.

Here's a picture of me at a design futures exhibition in the Netherlands, explaining the visitors a weird scifi story to go with our project, an Arduino-based game.

At some point I dropped out and came back to Spain. I taught programming to children, and worked in a consultancy as a programmer; but my favourite job was in an HR tech enterprise where I was part of the internal frontend support team, doing Inner Source platform work.

When I found out about Wasp, I immediately got excited thinking that it could be a continuation of the kind of work I love doing the most. I just really like speaking with developers in the open, and creating robust tools to simplify their work!

What is your favorite language?

I know you probably were expecting a programming language, but I’ll be a cheeky and say a human one: in the past few years, I’ve been listening to a lot of music in Catalan and Occitan, and I really love how they sound.

But on the computer side, my current favorite (and for quite some years already) is doing dark type magic in TypeScript. Although I would resurrect LiveScript if I could.

What are you most excited about in Wasp?

The opportunity to really cut down on the time spent from having an idea, to writing code for it, and not configuration and boilerplate. We take care of all the boring stuff and people just need to care about the code that makes their app unique. And you can be sure that this is how a senior engineer would do it, with best practices and top library choices baked int.

What’s a feature or project you’re most proud of?

A few years ago some friends had the idea for vecinoscabrones.com and we made it together. It’s a search engine that can search for any sentence in a famous Spanish sitcom, and get you the exact moment they said it, links to that moment in streaming sites, and make a GIF out of it. And I’m very proud that I got the whole GIF subtitling and generation done on the client!

You can see this gif here.

How did you start coding?

I was obsessed with being on the family computer as a kid. First it was The Sims, but on occasions I went into C:\ and touched things I shouldn’t, and crashed it. At some point, my parents bought me my own second-hand laptop, and by chance it had Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash installed.

I somehow found them and started playing with first their editors and then with the code, and the rest is history. I remember one of the first things I “created” was a HTML file with the lyrics to “American Idiot” by Green Day, that I then burned to a CD to hand to my friends.

Your dev setup?

Just a MacBook, VS Code, and Apple Reminders! I used to get really carried away trying to get everything super customized but now I’m a believer in the zen of defaults.

What is your current favorite gem, library, tool, or anything else that helps you with your work? Why?

The most important tools I’ve found lately have been Raycast, OrbStack, jj, and mise. Specifically jj makes my work so much faster.

Lastly, where can people find or connect with you online?

On Bluesky, Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn. Also IRL in Barcelona, Spain.