I'm Mari. I'm a staff software engineer at Netflix, working across distributed systems, architecture, product design, and technical leadership. I write to understand the work: the systems, the people who build them, and what happens as both change.
This is where I keep what I learn: field notes on reading code and evolving software, essays about power and learning in technical organizations, poems, stories, and experiments you can run.
I grew up in Cuba, found my way through Uruguay, and live in California now. The longer story is on the About page.
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- Chop Wood, Carry Water systems & craft 2026 Twelve months of alignment, five weeks of build — what staff-level platform work actually looks like.
- 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.
- 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.
recién publicado Latest
- The Team Programming Interface systems & craft 2026 A Team Programming Interface describes the consequences of a team's capabilities across team boundaries: what changes beyond the API calls, and when, as you use it.
- Lore: your screenshots as your bio! essay 2026 A photo library full of screenshots is less a gallery than a trail of attention. Lore reads that accidental archive back as a short portrait.
- Beyond the CAP theorem: PACELC, a set of trade-offs that better describe distributed systems systems & craft 2026 CAP only covers what happens during a partition. PACELC names the latency versus consistency trade-off every distributed system makes on every request.
- 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?
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