I'm Mari. I'm a staff software engineer at Netflix, where I work on consumer identity — the systems that know which device is yours, which session to end, which of two hundred million accounts just signed in. I've been writing software for fifteen years and poems for longer, in two languages (a veces en las dos a la vez).
I learn by building, so most of what lives here is something you can read, run, or play with: essays on debugging and distributed systems, poems, stories, the occasional talk. The engineering and the poetry come from the same hands, and I stopped keeping them in separate rooms.
Cuba → Uruguay → United States. California, these days.
- Navigating (large) codebases while keeping your sanity systems & craft 2021 Ten years in, joining Netflix: the merits and perils of navigating existing systems when joining a team.
- Chop Wood, Carry Water systems & craft 2026 Twelve months of alignment, five weeks of build — what staff-level platform work actually looks like.
- Debugging: the map is not the territory systems & craft 2021 The delta technique — debugging as narrowing the gap between your model and reality.
- My grandma braid my hair essay 2022 Memory, lineage, and the women who shaped her.
- We the drama cultures essay 2021 On drama, culture, and the stories we perform for each other.
- Introducing Codems: Code and poems weaved codems 2022 A codem is a portmanteau of code and poems: the code structure adds sense to the poem.
- Abriendo Caminos working in tech 2026 Founding a women-in-computing community on a Cuban intranet — and what happened to it when I could no longer reach the infrastructure that held it.
- AI in interviews systems & craft 2026 AI in interviews is inevitable — so what should we actually be testing for?
- Up poem 2025
- Two minds, one voice. Many minds, one direction working in tech 2025 Kahneman and Tversky, the patterns that sabotage collaboration, and the real work of building together.
- Structure adds scalability: a look beyond networks systems & craft 2024 A networking principle traced through databases, caches, APIs — and a Netflix device-data migration.
If you like what you find here, I hope you'll allow me into the sacred space that is your email, and share this journey with me.