Hi! I'm Chris Cortez — I really enjoy backend engineering: infrastructure, virtual machines, servers, and the systems behind the scenes. I end up building projects around that itch.
Explore my projects and let's connect.
View ProjectsProjects
Real-Time Coin-Flip PvP & Chat Engine
An event-driven real-time game and chat system featuring modular domain architecture, deadlock-free pessimistic PostgreSQL row locking, Redis Pub/Sub cluster broadcasting, Redis rate-limiting, bcrypt authentication, and an automated pytest CI/CD suite.
Event-Driven Telemetry Ingestion Pipeline
A high-throughput ingestion engine for real-time metrics. FastAPI offloads incoming traffic to RabbitMQ, and an async Python worker performs dynamically-batched bulk inserts into PostgreSQL via asyncpg — instead of hitting the database on every single request.
Dockerized Service with a Full CI/CD Pipeline
A log-processing service where every pull request is gated by an automated pytest suite spun up against a live MongoDB container in GitHub Actions, plus a separate on-demand workflow that builds and publishes the Docker image.
PHP to React/Node.js Migration
Leading the architectural migration of a legacy PHP remote-workforce monitoring platform to a modern stack with React, Express.js and JavaScript.
Voice Transcription & Text-to-Speech Webapp
A research-driven webapp for real-time speech-to-text and text-to-speech, evaluating open-source models like Fish Speech, Tacotron, Tortoise, Bark and Suno for accessibility use cases.
About me
I'm a Computer Science & Engineering student (Universidad Don Bosco, El Salvador) who spends most of my time on backend systems: event-driven pipelines, async APIs, and the infrastructure that keeps them running. My team — me, and my beloved colleagues Jenn and Mau — took 2nd place nationally in the 2023 IEEEXtreme 24-hour Competitive Programming Contest.
At Kafie Consulting I designed Python APIs and data pipelines with full technical autonomy, and self-hosted and administered Ubuntu servers running n8n workflows that automated over 2,000 email interactions a month. Before that, at Fundación Emprende Hoy, I led the migration of a legacy PHP time-tracking platform to React + Express.js + JavaScript, and built a TTS/voice-transcription tool evaluating open-source models like Bark, Tortoise and Fish Speech. My colleague Carlos, who came from a professional environment, also taught me a lot about working seriously with Git.
Outside of client work, I build distributed systems for fun, like: an event-driven telemetry pipeline that batches writes into PostgreSQL through RabbitMQ, and a real-time coin-flip PvP game that started as a joke but turned into a genuinely complex distributed system, built to learn WebSockets and Redis Pub/Sub. I also build CI pipelines with GitHub Actions — automated pytest gates that block a merge if the tests fail, plus on-demand Docker Hub publishing.
Toolbox: Python (FastAPI, Flask), Node.js/JavaScript (Express), PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, GitHub Actions, and Linux server administration — with enough React and Bootstrap/Tailwind to ship a decent frontend when I need one.
Always learning, and always up for a new distributed-systems rabbit hole.
Get in touch
Email: chrisdesanfrancisco@gmail.com
GitHub: github.com/RoqueLovelace
LinkedIn: Chris Cortez