Carlos Osuna

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.

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 2009, 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 was hired by BSD Enterprise, a nearshore companies with a specialty for Software quality assurance and offices in the US, Mexico, Spain and Chile. There, he began working Sales team as Sales Engineer ultimately landing the Home Depot account.

After just one year there, Carlos returned to his role as Data Integration Specialist which were in awful need by the Mexican, Brazilian and American branches of ESAB using EDI X12 documents over an AS2 encrypted lines using Microsoft BizTalk, as broker. The first system implemented was the Mexican side, 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.

He also collaborated briefly with the Mobile Development team, which splits their 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 also became a chief interest for the group, both on the client and on the server side using Vapor Framework.

Ultimately he became part of the team in charge of the gob.mx portal, which was created to unite and integrate on a single portal the full breath of paperwork and formalities both federal, state and municipal-wide. With that in mind, it needed a multi disciplinary team knowledgeable in Data Integration, Enterprise Service Bus, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Integration and Containerization. Collectively this technologies later became known as DevOps and in the end became a fundamental part of the Digital National Strategy.

With that in mind, the next 3 years became key in learning the DevOps playbook and trying to adapt and use it for other customers.

Accenture

In January 2017, Carlos joined Accenture as lead DevOps Engineer for the Delivery Center, Monterrey.

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.