I ran a real estate brokerage for fifteen years before I wrote my first line of production code.
Senior Software Engineer at Dell (IBM Vault, DevSecOps). Solo iOS developer at night. Georgetown, TX.
I joined the Air Force out of high school. United States Air Force Honor Guard and Security Police.
After that I went back to San Antonio and worked in sales until I earned my real estate license. That license is where my real journey started. I became a broker and built Cantera Realty into one of the top real estate companies in San Antonio, with 25 agents and 5 employees. I was the CEO and the CFO and whatever else the day needed. I also built a fully paperless workflow for my agents years before the rest of the market got there, so they could work from anywhere instead of driving to a desk in an office. Along the way I earned national recognition from NAHREP and served on multiple MLS boards in San Antonio.
Then I met my wife and we moved to Georgetown. I went back to school and finished my bachelor's, then my master's, both while still working. The master's was one of the hardest things I have ever done.
With the degrees finished I tried to move into the corporate world and could not get hired. Nobody would count fifteen years of running a profitable company as on-the-job experience, because I had never worked for anybody else.
So I taught myself to code. The longer version 👇
The seed was older than any of this. When I was a kid you could type a change at the DOS prompt and watch a stick figure move across the screen. That stayed with me.
I started teaching myself. I found out data science was an option and went after it. I opened a GitHub account and started building things. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just learning, absorbing everything in front of me.
Then I enrolled in a bootcamp and moved my RV to San Antonio while my family stayed in Georgetown. Eight hours a day, Monday through Friday. Then COVID hit and the classroom went away. The program wasn't built to survive that, so I left and finished the work at home, where I had a real internet connection and my own monitors and everything I needed to keep going.
More cohorts after that. Then a company called TalentPath trained me further and placed me in a contract role at Dell Technologies. When the contract ended I got hired on, and that happened because I networked with everyone I met and found the role myself.
At Dell I spent a couple of years owning the vulnerabilities for every image the company ships. Then I moved to the Vault team, where the work is support tickets and Linux machines across non-prod and prod, and where I picked up Go, since Go is what the Vault binary is built on. IBM acquired HashiCorp along the way, so it is IBM Vault now and I work in DevSecOps.
Everything below ships under Big Beard Apps, my iOS studio.
- PayoffPilot: plan your way out of debt, comparing Snowball and Avalanche against your real numbers. On the App Store after nine months of nights and weekends.
- Feastmark: turn recipe videos into your personal cookbook, one tap from Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Coming soon.
- ReelTalk: fishing pun stickers for iMessage, thirty hand-made originals starring a bass. Approved by Apple, releasing September 1, 2026.
- Gunmark: your armory documented, every gun and mod and receipt and tax stamp. Beta signups open.
Outside the studio:
- BrokerMade: real estate websites, built by a Texas broker.
- Cantera Realty: neighborhood guides, school data, and market numbers for Georgetown, Texas.
- My site and blog: where I write about all of this. The list below syncs itself from it.
- Apple's Uploader Wanted an Icon Size That Doesn't Exist · Aug 6, 2026
- Nine Months of Nights and Weekends Ends With an App Store Link · Aug 4, 2026
- The Upload Wasn't Slow. It Never Connected. · Aug 3, 2026
- The Model Didn't Hallucinate. It Read the Wrong 2,000 Characters. · Aug 2, 2026
- What Shipping With No Analytics Actually Costs · Aug 1, 2026
Georgetown, TX · raulcpena.com