About
Software architect and consultant in the Netherlands, in the field since 2004. Now focused on helping teams harness AI coding assistants.
I’m Marcos Barbero, a software architect and consultant based in the Netherlands. I’ve been in this field since late 2004.
Most of that time went into distributed systems on the JVM — Spring Boot and Spring Cloud services, the messaging between them, and the platform concerns that decide whether any of it stays maintainable at year three. Some of that work is public: I maintain open-source projects around Spring Cloud and Spring Security, and several posts in the archive are still the reference people land on when they hit those problems.
Why AI-assisted engineering
What pulled me toward this work is the modernisation of software engineering itself — and a conviction I’ve held for a long time:
Software engineering was never about writing code.
It was always about understanding a problem well enough to model it, drawing boundaries that hold, and making decisions your team can still live with two years later. Typing was never the hard part.
Which is exactly why AI coding assistants are more interesting than the demos suggest, and more dangerous. They remove effort from the part that was never the bottleneck, and they apply pressure to the parts that always were: judgment, structure, review, knowing what “correct” means here. Teams that had those things get real leverage. Teams that didn’t find out the hard way, faster than before.
That’s the gap I work in.
How I work
I’m building this practice deliberately and taking a small number of engagements at a time — which means the work gets my actual attention rather than being handed to a bench. I work in your codebase alongside your engineers, not from a slide deck, and I’d rather tell you early that I’m the wrong fit than discover it in week three.
Elsewhere
- GitHub — open source, mostly Spring and Kotlin.
- LinkedIn — the professional version.
- RSS — for the writing.
Working together
If something here is relevant to a problem you’re facing, the fastest next step is a short call — fifteen minutes, no pitch. Or see what I offer first.