alejo.ch
Hello!
I am Alejandro Cuervo-Hotz (né Forero Cuervo), a software engineer, husband and father. Born in 1980 in Bogota, I’ve lived in Zürich since 2007.
You can reach me at a+3kp@alejo.ch.
Lately
Recently (2026-06-14) I’ve been thinking about:
📷 Züri Portals: Photography project to convey the beauty of life in Zürich by studying building entrances.
🖋️ AI: Transposing the Agent Loop (Posted: 2026-04-15, 7 min): Instead of few long-running agent loops, aim for many short agent loops, each moving one step closer to the solution to your complex problems. This massive decomposition avoids many of the problems of context decay.
🖋️ Knitting: Mental health and growth (Posted: 2026-05-28, 6 min): Knitting —the art of tangling very long threads into useful and unlikely shapes— offers personal lessons about learning and cognition.
🖋️ Avoid Boolean Types (Posted: 2026-06-14, 4 min): In source code or databases, prefer enumerations over boolean types. Use boolean types only for expressions that compute temporary values fed to conditional expressions like if, while, or SQL’should WHERE.
💾 Image Filters: TypeScript browser-based non-destructive image editor based on OpenCV.
My hobbies
I enjoy writing, knitting, photography, drawing (with and without software), playing the harmonica, exercising and programming. I’m learning to cook. You can read my essays, short-stories or poems.
Since 2014, the only text editor I’ve used is my own: Edge. I also maintain a few other (smaller) programs on my github account.
Work
I’ve worked at Google since 2007. I was a manager for five years but I missed the close contact with technology and went back to an individual contributor role. For nearly 15 years (from 2009 to 2024) I lead a team designing and implementing algorithms to make massive distributed systems more reliable and efficient. In 2016 I wrote two chapters (Load Balancing in the Datacenter and Handling Overload) in Google’s SRE book, covering some of the earlier algorithms we designed —which other BigTech companies have since copied.