Cuau Cortés

I’m a developer and two-time founder based in Mexico City. I enjoy learning about pre-Hispanic history and competing in track and field events.

About me

I consider myself a problem solver more than a dev/backend/frontend/whatever. I see software as a mean to solve problems not as the end itself so I’ll do what needs to be done.

I have more fun working for small companies where I can wear many hats, talk to customers directly and have enough autonomy to make decisions. Lately I’ve been getting more and more into 3D printing and hardware/electronics .

Send me an email me at cuaucortes.com. I also have GitHub and LinkedIn which honestly I don’t use that much.

Startups founded

Suarmi (RIP 2024)

Crypto <> fiat ramp for the Mexican market connected directly into Mexican banking rails. Pretty innovative at the time since the only options were P2P or credit/debit cards. We made buying and selling crypto in Mexico fast and affordable. I built the entire tech stack using Clojure, ClojureScript, Datomic, a bit of Python and vanilla JS.

You can see how it worked in these videos (all in Spanish btw). We were trying to emulate what MoonPay did back in the day. We succeeded but quickly realized the Mexican market was never going to get big enough.

Resuave (exit 2021)

Sending money from the US/Europe to Mexico is solved, Wise, Remitly, etc.—the list goes on. Turns out sending money FROM Mexico to other countries was super expensive and slow. We founded Resuave in 2020 to tackle that problem. It was acquired a year after working on it. Here’s where I first picked my Clojure based stack after learning about Nubank’s architecture and why they picked Datomic.

Current Projects

I’ve been using LLMs to learn more about hardware and electronics, and since getting a 3D printer now I’m not limited to software when coming up with products or solutions. These are some of the things I’m working at the moment:

PlanPlanPlants

I like plants. My plants are alive and well but they are not blooming as I think they could be blooming. I want to track how healthy they are in order for them to grow beautiful. Currently working on v2 of this, v1 was completed and left a lot of learnings.

TZeroHero

Measuring performance is essential for progress, sprinting is no different. My main issue right now is that I run in a fairly busy track. There are plenty of solutions to measure speed in track and field events but they are either way too expensive or just not good enough for the conditions I train in (laser based systems enter in this category).

I’m building an ESP32 mini + Raspberry Pi system to measure my sprinting times. There’s a looot of work left to do here but you can check these repos to get a better idea of its current state.

TrackThrow

Pretty much the same issue I have for TZeroHero, since I’m also a thrower I need a device or something that can tell me how far I throw in each workout. This one hasn’t quite started yet.

Ideas for the future

I’d like to get into autonomous robots, especially drones and roombas. Some projects already exist in which I’d like to get involved.