Exploration and Resiliency with Mauricio Galdieri

Break Things on Purpose

In this episode, we cover:

• Mauricio talks about his background and his role at Pismo (1:14)
• Jason and Mauricio discuss tech and reliability with regards to financial institutions (5:59)
• Mauricio talks about the work he has done in Chaos Engineering with reliability (10:36)
• Mauricio discusses things he and his team have done to maximize success (19:44)
• Mauricio talks about new technologies his team has been utilizing (22:59)

Links Referenced:

• Pismo: https://pismo.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pismo/

Transcript

Mauricio: That’s why the name Cockroach, I guess, if there’s a [laugh] a world nuclear war here, all that will survive would be cockroaches in our client’s data. [laugh]. So, I guess that’s the gist of it.

Jason: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about Chaos Engineering and reliability. In this episode, we chat with Mauricio Galdieri, a staff engineer at Pismo about testing versus exploration, reliability and resiliency, and the challenges of bringing new technologies to the financial sector.

Jason: Welcome to the show.

Mauricio: Hey, thank you. Welcome. Thanks for having me here, Jason.

Jason: Yeah. So, Mauricio, you and I have chatted before in the past. We were at Chaos Conf, and you are part of a panel. So, I’m curious, I guess to kick things off, can you tell folks a little bit more about yourself and what you do at Pismo? And then we can maybe pick up from our conversations previously?

Mauricio: Okay, awesome. I work as a staff engineer here at Pismo. I work in a squad called staff engineering squad, so we’re a bunch of—five squad engineers there. And we’re mostly responsible for coming up with new ways of using the existing technology, new technologies for us to have, and also standardize things like how we use those technologies here? How does it fit the whole processes we have here? And how does it fit in the pipelines we have here, also?

And so, we do lots of documentation, lots of POCs, and try different things, and we talk to different people from different companies and see how they’re solving problems that we also have. So, this is basically our day-to-day activities here. Before that, well, I have a kind of a different story, I guess. Most people that work in this field, have a degree in something like a technical degree or something like that. But I actually graduated as an architect in urban planning, so I came from a completely different field.

But I’ve always worked as a software developer since a long time ago, more than [laugh] willing to disclose. So, at that time when I started working with software development, I like to say that startups were called dotcoms that back then, so, [laugh] there was a lots of job opportunities back then, so I worked as a software developer at that time. And things evolved. I grew less and less as an architect and more as an engineer, so after I graduated, I started to look for a second degree, but on the more technical college, so I went to an engineering college and graduated as a system analyst.

So, from then on, I’ve always worked as a software developer and never, never have done any house planning or house project or something like that. And I really doubt if I could do that right now [laugh] so I may be a lousy architect [in that sense 00:03:32]. But anyway, I’ve worked in different companies for both in private and public sectors. And I’ve worked with consultancy firms and so on. But just before I came to Pismo, I went working with a FinTech.

So, this is where I was my first contact with the world of finance in a software context. Since then, I’ve digged deep into this industry, and here I am now working at Pismo, it’s for almost five years now.

Jason: Wow. That quite a journey. And although it’s a unique journey, it’s also one that I feel like a lot of folks in tech come from different backgrounds and maybe haven’t gone down the traditional computer science route. With that said, you know, one of the things you mentioned FinTech. Can you give us a little bit of a description of Prismo, just so folks understand the company that you’re working at now?

Mauricio: Oh, yeah. Well, Pismo, it’s a company that has about six years now. And we provide infrastructure for financial services. So, we’re not banks ourselves, but we provide the infrastructure for banks to build their financial projects with this. So basically, what we do is we manage accounts, we manage those accounts’ balances, we have connections with credit card networks, so we process—we’re also a credit card processor.

We issue cards, although we’re not the issuer in this in the strict sense, but we issue cards here and manage all the lifecycle of those cards. And basically, that’s it. But we have a very broad offering of products, from account management to accounting management, and transactions management, and spending control limits and stuff. So, we have a very broad product portfolio. But basically, what we do is provide infrastructure for financial services.

Jason: That’s fascinating to me. So, if I were to sum that up, would it be accurate to say that you’re basically like Software as a Service for financial institutions? You do all the heavy lifting?

Mauricio: Yeah, yeah. I could say that, yeah.

Jason: It’s interesting to me because, you know, traditionally, we always think of banks because they need to be regulated and there needs to be a whole lot more security and reliability around finances, we always think of banks as being very slow when it comes to technology. And so, I think it’s interesting that, in essence, what you’ve said with trying the latest technology and getting to play around with new technology and how it applies, especially within your staff engineering group, it’s almost the exact opposite. You’re sort of this forefront, this leading edge within the world of finance and technology.

Mauricio: Yeah. And that actually is, it’s something that—it’s the most difficult part to sell banks to sign up with us, you know? Because they have those ancient systems running on-premises and most likely running on top of COBOL programs and so on. But at the same time, it’s highly, highly reliable. That they’ve been running those systems for, like, 40 years, even more than that, so it’s a very highly reliable.

And as you said, it’s a very regulated industry, so it’s very hard to sell them this kind of new approach to banking. And actually, we consider this as almost an innovation for them. And it’s a little bit strange to talk about innovation in a sense that we’re proposing other companies to run in the cloud. This doesn’t sound innovating at all nowadays. So, every company runs their systems in the cloud nowadays, so it’s difficult to [laugh] realize that this is actually innovation in the banking system because they’re not used to running those things.

And as you said, they’re slow in adopting new technologies because of security concerns, and so on. So, we’re trying to bring these new things to the table and prove them. And we had to prove banks and other financial institutions that it is possible to run a banking system a hundred percent in the cloud while maintaining security standards and security compliances and governance compl...