Pretty Brilliant People – Orlando Monteverde

This edition of Pretty Brilliant People is a special one, as today we interview one of the OGs of Pretty Technical, Orlando Monteverde. Orlando has been with us from the very beginning. From the early days of trial and error and experimentation, to paving the road ahead to what we would eventually become, our journey wouldn't be what it is without him. Orlando also gives us a sneak peek into his life outside of work, too.

You've been with Pretty Technical since the very beginning, July 2020. What was it like in those early days, and how different does the company feel now?

It was like the "Wild West" in the best way possible. Back then, we were just five people wearing every hat—frontend, backend, infrastructure—learning everything on the fly. We had the freedom to experiment, break things, and fix them in long Google Meet sessions where we’d all brainstorm until the problem was solved. There’s a certain magic in that level of closeness and "trial and error."

Now, the feeling is much more robust. We have a larger team, more structure, and multiple projects in production where there’s real money and commitment on the line with every release. While I miss knowing every single detail of every area, I feel a huge sense of pride. Looking back and seeing how those early experiments evolved into the professional platforms we run today shows how much we’ve grown without losing that core spirit of building things together.

You built a cryptocurrency payment system from the ground up, including deploying your own Bitcoin node. How do you even begin a project like that?

At the time, crypto seemed like the next "big thing," so we thought, why not include it in our platform? We started researching and found an open-source Bitcoin node written in Go. We forked it and just started experimenting. We didn't have much prior knowledge, but we were highly motivated and full of curiosity. We actually managed to get the node running on a virtual machine and successfully connected it to our platform. Ultimately, we discarded it because of the legal and compliance implications—it was much more practical to integrate a third-party provider—but the process was quite an adventure. We learned so much about infrastructure, blockchain mechanics, transaction signing, and keeping a node synchronized.

What's one open source project that genuinely changed how you think about software?

There are actually two that stand out to me. First is the official MongoDB driver for Go. When the community transitioned away from the old mgo package, the new official driver had practically no documentation. I decided to study the project's source code myself and wrote a series of posts on my personal blog explaining how it worked. At the time, it was the only English documentation available, and it’s still one of my most popular posts today! The second is melody, a package for handling WebSockets in Go. The original maintainer stopped updating it, which inspired me to create my own open-source WebSocket package. It turned out great and we actually use it quite heavily here at Pretty Technical.

Go is your language of choice. What is it about Go that got you hooked?

Before Go, I was building backends with Node.js. While I liked it, it always gave me a few headaches. I decided to try Go out of pure curiosity and instantly fell in love with its simplicity, both for coding and deployment. Being able to compile an entire project into a single binary in seconds is amazing. I love that I can build a robust microservice using almost zero external dependencies, relying mostly on the standard library. And the way Go handles concurrency? It is so ridiculously simple that it still blows my mind. It truly feels like a language built specifically for microservices.

You describe yourself as someone who loves learning and the ever-changing world of IT. What are you currently trying to get better at?

With the massive boom in Artificial Intelligence, I’ve been investing a lot of my time there. It feels like magic, but I want to truly understand how it works under the hood and how to leverage it properly. Specifically, I'm focusing on the best practices for maintaining high code quality now that we can generate projects in minutes—diving into concepts like MCP, Skills, and SDD. Alongside that, I’m continuing to study Clean Architectures and Event-Driven systems. Things move so fast in the IT world, you really have to stay curious to keep up.

Finally, what's something your colleagues at Pretty Technical would be surprised to learn about you?

I think they’d be surprised by my life outside of coding! First, I'm a huge animal lover and the proud owner of four dogs, including a Siberian Husky, which keeps things pretty lively. I'm also a massive gamer. I occasionally stream on Twitch, I'm currently obsessed with Monster Hunter, and I love classic RPGs. My workspace has a few hidden geeky gems, too: I have a small collection of Super Mario and Kirby figures, and the coaster I use for my daily coffee is actually an old Super Mario Bros 3 cartridge!