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.
Email me at a+3kp@alejo.ch.
Lately
Recently (2026-07-30) I’ve been thinking about:
🎬: The Oddisey: I enjoyed Nolan’s production of The Odyssey. I appreciated the storytelling: how different parts of the journey are cohesively woven into a single story. The story builds towards a convincing final resolution. I have mixed feelings about the music.
Dancing: Two worlds (Posted: 2026-07-24, 4 min): Two activities that share the same label, “dancing”, are actually very different. How I feel, as a Colombian, about dancing salsa in Zürich. And, related, my salsita playlist.
🎬: Mr Inbetween I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching television series Mr Inbetween, a daring mix of action, crime thriller, relationship drama, and dark comedy. The deadpan delivery makes this take on the “loveable criminal” genre very refreshing.
📷 Photos: Züri Portals: Photography project to convey the beauty of life in Zürich by studying building entrances.
💾 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 led 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 large companies have since copied.