Gabriel Díaz Andrade: 3 year Anniversary

Little Taller: How has your role evolved over the past year, and what new skills or responsibilities have you taken on?

Gabriel Díaz: The change I have had from last year to this one has been huge, both personally and professionally. We are currently living a new revolution with the arrival of AI, a tool that is a bit scary, but nevertheless makes me feel very excited, because thanks to it I have become more efficient, and I have assumed more responsibilities in my role. This same year I have implemented AI in all my workflows, both for requirements analysis, reading and creating code, diagrams, automations and many more things, I really feel that it is something that we cannot stop, and that we must move forward with it.

I don't want to forget to mention that my personal change has been huge as well. This same year I have implemented many changes in my life, I have started making new friends, doing sports and activities outside my work that I had never before thought I would be able to do, which has allowed me to improve my peace of mind. I really consider that being well with oneself is more important than any other thing.

Little Taller: What project or client engagement from the past year stands out as your favorite, and why did it resonate with you?

Gabriel Díaz: I'm someone who prefers working on the backend rather than the frontend. We've recently worked on several Shopify projects building backend solutions for different partners, which was quite challenging since I'd never worked with Shopify before. I feel it's my favorite because I had to do a lot of things outside of my normal routine, implementing connections with different CRMs, creating custom server-side logic, and building an IDP for a custom SSO implementation the partner required.

Little Taller: Share a challenge you faced this year and how you overcame it. What did you learn from that experience?

Gabriel Díaz: I think the biggest challenge I've had, has been in a pretty big project that we manage here at Little Taller, which among many other things is responsible for calculating commissions on a daily basis, using invoices exported to our system from a third party system used by the client for many years.

This system had several months presenting a failure, because exporting was not working properly, we were not getting all the invoices in the correct time, for example an invoice generated today would sometimes appear in 10 days, and another created 15 days ago could disappear today and appears tomorrow even if it were updated today, this made it difficult to track new invoices as the date filter would not pick them up properly because when they reappeared they came back with the correct edition date and not with the date when they came back. That caused commissions to be inaccurate. After many negotiations it was ruled out that the third-party system could be made to work correctly, so we had to implement a solution on our side.

After evaluating the different options, the only viable one was to export all the data, however that in turn brought big problems, the data had about 1 million records, and to optimally review that data using some programming language was completely unfeasible because of the execution time and memory it would require. It was then after research and discussions with the team we came up with the solution. We implemented a temporal table to find out with a SQL statement the updated and new records by comparing this temporal table against the real one, the time to import the data was not a problem because we used the CSV exported directly, importing data using CSV is extremely fast, in less than 1 min we had all the imported data in the temporary DB. And the query didn’t take more than 30 secs to be executed.

In this way we were able to solve a problem that, despite not being directly in our system, was affecting it. I cannot fail to mention that I learned that teamwork and communication was essential to reach genius solutions. If there is no good communication in the team, it is very unlikely to achieve success and adequate solutions.

Little Taller: Little Taller places a big emphasis on ownership and orchestration. How have you seen this reflected in your daily work and how has it impacted your work output this year?

Gabriel Díaz: Working at Little Taller has been a truly incredible and enriching experience, as it has been completely different from my previous work experiences. Here at LT each person assumes responsibilities and is responsible for them in a very autonomous way. This does not mean that there is no communication, on the contrary, here it is very common to ask for help or enter a video call to talk about some new feature or update that is not clear. It's as if we are all connected for the same purpose. I really feel that this has had a profound impact on the way I work in a positive way.

Little Taller: Looking ahead, what aspects of your professional life are you most excited about developing further in the coming year?

Gabriel Díaz:  There are a lot of aspects I want to develop, I guess that the most important would be my language Skills, I had one and a half year learning French, and next year I have the goal of achieving a B2 level. Learning a new language is not only learning about phrases or grammar, is learning about culture, about people, that’s what makes me feel excited, and what motivates me to move forward.

Other important aspect I want to mention is that this year I have decided not only to become an AI user, but to understand it and move forward with it. I have taken many courses on AI learning base concepts as well as new tools like AutoML. Likewise last month I started learning about neural networks, an amazing tool that is behind many of the LLMs we know today like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, etc. I really feel happy to be able to understand a bit of how this works, and I want to develop myself in that area. I hope in the future to be able to dedicate myself fully to that industry.

The future that awaits us is bright and full of changes that will make this world a better place, and I am 100% sure that I want be part of that change. My words to myself and to those who are reading this are: Never give up, be strong and achieve your dreams.

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