I started programming at nine in Valladolid because I wanted a website about video games. It was called manucorporation.com, which felt like a serious name at the time.
At fifteen my father bought his first iPhone, the 3G. I borrowed it, installed Xcode, and tried to make something that felt like the games I loved. That became my own take on Geometry Wars, built on cocos2d, and the engine pulled me in as much as the game did, so I started contributing to it. The game grew into Infinity Field, reached the App Store Top 10 and ended up published by EA. I was still a teenager sitting in Spain, watching hundreds of thousands of people play something I made, and that was the moment software stopped being a hobby for me.
Infinity Field is how I got to San Francisco. At seventeen I flew out for a summer to work at JoyPad, came home, started a computer-science degree and felt restless almost immediately. The next year I went back for longer, joined an incubator and built developer SDKs at OpenKit and TinySpark. Then I came home again and wrote the first commit of Gin.
Since then it has been compilers, language runtimes, web frameworks, GPU rendering and distributed infrastructure. The domain keeps changing but the interesting part is always the same, the obvious solution falls over and you have to understand the system well enough to make the simple one hold.
What I’m working on now
I’m a principal engineer at Builder.io, where I set the technical direction for our AI agent platform across product, design and code. The infrastructure spins up ephemeral Kubernetes clusters for AI workflows, connects to enterprise networks through multi-tenant VPCs and tears everything down when the work is done. My favorite piece is a batch pipeline that consolidates an agent’s project memory while it sleeps, so it wakes up with a smaller context and a better memory.
Open source
- Gin, a Go web framework with around 88k stars and 290k+ dependent projects. I wrote more about its router in the Gin write-up.
- Qwik, which I helped take from proof-of-concept to production, including its Rust compiler and a resumability model that skips client-side hydration.
- Stencil, where I designed the compiler architecture and the virtual DOM, and Ionic across Angular, React, Vue and plain JavaScript.
- cocos2d, the game engine I used for Infinity Field.
How I think about engineering
When I was a teenager I wrote in my CV that I wanted to “make the best software ever, and build it so the people who use it love it”. The first half makes me cringe now, but I care about the second half a lot more than I did back then.
Mostly it means treating performance and DX as features instead of things you fix later. A framework should make the fast path the easy one, because developers, like water, follow the path of least resistance. Infrastructure should be boring under load. You do the hard work once, in the compiler or in the architecture, so the person using the thing ends up with fewer decisions to make than you had.
Where to find me
I’m @manucorporat on GitHub and @manucorporat on Twitter, based between Lisbon and Budapest. If you are building something in this space, send me a message, I would love to hear about it :)