Carlos Osuna

Carlos Osuna (born November 22, 1970) is a Mexican computer programmer, software architect and entrepreneur best known as being one of the founders of Espacios Business Media during its inception days. He installed one of the first commercial Linux web hosting servers in Latin America, using Red Hat in 1997. He later left that company in 1998 to pursue other interests, joining Consiss in 1999 as a Java specialist, leaving in 2005 and becoming a technical architect and integration specialist for Xerox Learning Services in 2008, where he left in 2012 after being downsized.

Currently he works for BSD Enterprise as Integration Specialist working both with Microsoft technologies, including .NET and BizTalk and Java using Spring Integration and MuleSoft. He's currently spearheading Seminal work to integrate Apple's Swift in server-side environments using (Ubuntu and Windows) inside AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud services. He was a past collaborator for the Java Bindings for KHTML and collaborator for the Mono (software) and Apache Tomcat projects, mostly in documentation and bug hunting.

Early life

Carlos Osuna was born and grew up in a mixed jewish/catholic household on Northern Mexico just 200 miles south of the Texas border, in the small town of Monterrey, which surge in development during the late 70's and 80's, where his family had a construction business. His father was a civil engineer coming from neighbor state of Tamaulipas and his mother was a housewife. They had three sons of which Carlos was the youngest. His mom's younger sister was to be Monterrey's Tec first head of Computer engineering division, hosting the Electronic Systems and Computer Systems degrees. As such, she had access to all the universities resources and promptly help his nephew grow in a computer savvy environment.

At age 9, Carlos was enrolled into a children's computer workshop led by the Arturo Rosenblueth Foundation, where he learnt LOGO using Commodore VIC-20. This would be followed by a Summer Camp at Monterrey Tech's focused on Apple II programming using BASIC and Pascal.

At age 18, Carlos attended Monterrey's Tec per his aunt's desire, but had to drop out due to poor grades. After several unsuccessful attempts, Carlos finally completed the BSE in Industrial and Systems Engineer at age 24 at the Universidad Regiomontana.

Business career

Tequila Effect

Late 1994, Mexico entered into a severe crisis due steep currency devaluation product of a failed monetary strategy. This phenomenon was called the Tequila Effect which was chronicled accurately by Jorge Castañeda in his bestseller The Mexican Shock (1995).

This kept Carlos away from the labor market as this was a time of uncertainty and severe recession. After many failed job interviews, Carlos decided to start his own business in association with a successful young salesman named Raul Garcia. They formed Espacios de México which would later transform into the leading social media and community management service Espacios Business Media, led by Abelardo Leal.

Espacios de México

In 1996, after thorough discussions, Carlos and Raul decided to settle in Home Page creation service company in a 10 ft-square office near Monterrey's downtown, in a worn down neighborhood, next to the Alameda a 1940 art deco open plaza that had seen better days. They had moderate success giving HTML and Internet Marketing seminars in a local hotel called Hotel Rio.

Things were rough at the first days, as people had no idea what Internet meant and those days online access was accomplished by slow land line based modems which averaged 2.4 kbits/sec. Elegant graphics and elaborated designs were out of the question as either CSS or HTML4 hadn't been created yet. Rudimentary designs, but well thought out designs with sometimes awful results .

As time went by, the need for an in-house host was needed and Espacios bought a brand new Pentium Pro system in 1998. It needed an OS and Carlos selected Red Hat Linux 5.0 dubbed "Hurricane". This would be one of the first Linux implementations used on ISP throughout Mexico and one of the first implementations in Latin America. Since none of the team knew how to create dynamic database driven sites, all data was housed inside the server and no tiers were needed for the design.

In late 1998, internal politics drew Carlos out and a new CTO was named. He would follow Carlos' legacy and implement FoxWeb to integrate with applications created in FoxPro.

Consiss, S.A. de C.V.

The year 1999 will mean a profound change on the way web page and website design were done. Microsoft's Active Server Pages—later known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic—would revolutionize server-side computing, creating the Web Platform ideal to migrate current client-server solutions into a more transparent and user friendly environments.

As such, Carlos was hired by Consiss as leading programmer for their B2B development strategies. Since their current client Vitro had established Java as their reference platform, Carlos' team had to find an alternative to ASP in order to interact with both their data warehouse solution, created with Cognos and an Oracle back-end as well as interact with their current ERP JD Edwards WorldSoftware which was hosted in AS/400 minicomputers. Carlos' team found the solution in a fledgling web server called the Java Web Server (JWS) which could handle Java servlet and Java Server Pages in one package. IBM's solution at that time, which was also recommended to Vitro's staff, WebSphere was limited to servlet execution.

After 4 years of successful implementations using the JWS pattern exclusively based on Server Side Includes and JSP, Carlos moved on to more meaningful projects at Consiss, including a complex middleware setup for convenience store manager Oxxo. The solution required a complex interaction between the current Point-of-Sale written in Clipper and the central ERP hosted by Oracle and exposed using WebMethods. This proved challenging as was one of the first uses of FTP based Web Services in a SOAP-like protocol of messages and protocols in an Enterprise application integration solution using the Business to Business Integration pattern.

Three more years passed and in 2007, Carlos decides to move on and following a brief stint at JackBe Mexico doing AJAX and mashup web development using EXT JS, it became clear that he needed a formal architect role as opposed to a mixed software developer/architect position.

With that in mind, Carlos decided to go freelance and offered enterprise integration and UML tutoring on his own, in association with Kernel Technologies (now an ACL official distributor). Several world class implementations were done during that year and dozens of people were trained on those seminars.

Xerox Learning Services

In 2008, Carlos was hired by Affiliated Computer Services to be one of technical architects for Learning Services division at the Mexican site which supported a SumTotal based LMS solution. This was a challenging job, as the LMS was mix of traditional ASP, which Carlos had learnt in the way, and .NET technologies. Carlos became Vertical lead for Integrations, one year after being hired.

In 2010, just two years after Carlos was hired, ACS was acquired by Xerox which transformed company into a fully owned subsidiary, which changed names into Xerox Learning Services, managed by the Human Resources, part of the Xerox Business Services division. During that time, new clients Deloitte, University of Miami and Beckman Coulter were acquired, while present ones were migrated into Cornerstone OnDemand Software, hosted on the cloud.

Part of Carlos' job was to care and maintain the DataFeed and DataFlow services which allowed other systems to integrate with the LMS seamlessly. A legacy Visual Basic application was used prior to Carlos tenure, which was replaced with several Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation solutions which allowed stateful ETL transfers of live data.

At that time, Carlos became involved with the seminal work of François Ragnet on the Future of Documents. He envisioned a world where Live Documents would be exchanged by systems which would keep both transport metadata and live dynamic data allowing the seamless transport of information without a constant process. His team at the Xerox Research Centre Europe led by Frederique Segond, created wonderful systems using Semantic Parsing . Sadly no actual collaboration was done at the time, due to budget constraints and the physical impossibility of the group working together across divisions. Only some minimal Proof-of-Concepts were creating using Google as basis as RDF as semantic query language.

In 2012, the Xerox Learning Services division was streamlined and all the team working at the Dallas, TX and Monterrey, Mexico offices were effectively downsized and the full team was laid-off. Carlos had to move on leaving behind plenty of ideas that were kept unimplemented at the time.

BSD Enterprise

After several months of soul searching and failed travel to San Francisco via a Startup, Carlos decided to integrate himself in 2013 into BSD Enterprise, a QAS expert with offices in the US, Mexico, Spain and Chile. There, he began working with .NET and Java teams to create and implements solutions on a grander scale.

By 2014, Carlos had become involved with integrations which were needed by the Mexican, Brazilian and American divisions of ESAB integrate for Electronic data interchange X12 documents over an AS2 encrypted lines using the said Microsoft BizTalk, as broker. (This software is message-based system which helps integrate companies across realms, using a specialized language called xLANG to create Orchestrations which route the said messages in and out from ports that usually correspond to Web Services, FTP sites or plain folders in the file system). The first system to be implemented was Mexico, which had a BPCS back-end; later came the Brazilian implementation, using SAP. Finally, USA-Europe operations had to be maintained. Carlos trained a staff specifically for this task during a two-year period.

As days went by there was a deeper need for Java expertise, including Spring and Spring Integration for companies like Home Depot, Xcaret Park and Estée Lauder, amongst others.

Currently he is associated with the Mobile Development team, which splits it's time between Ionic Framework cross-platform developments and native iOS and Android solutions, doing serious experiments on Apple TV with tvOS and Apple Watch using watchOS. Swift has become a new interest for the group, both on the client and on the server side using Vapor Framework.

Carlos knows, creates and uses UML architectural documents, knows API creation using Apiary (using API Blueprint) but also knows RAML (via MuleSoft) and Swagger for creating RESTful web services contracts.

Due to his double experience with both Java and .NET, he is able to better integrate homogeneous systems both on Linux and on Windows up until Windows Server 2008.

Personal life

Carlos is a practicing Jew close to his community. He loves baseball and American Football. In 1994, he made his reglementary social service before graduation at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO) where he was tasked on finding works of art from a particular artist, scatters throughout the world. He also worked that same year, and the year before on the local newspaper El Norte where he published several editorials regarding life and youth, which were published on a special supplement for youngsters.

He has worked in several inclusion initiatives specially for people with Autism and Asperger syndrome helping others understand the complexities of the mind of children inside the Autism spectrum. As a computer programmer and a specialist in computer science, he knows the connections and touch points between computer communications and human interaction. His goal is to one day resolve the Autism Question by using computer models simulating this interaction. He also wants to someday specialize in Bioinformatics so as to use help research in silicio that will create new DNA molecules which could later be tested in vitro, thus speeding the process of genetic manipulation.

He currently lives with his fathers caring for them at their old age.