Alberto Roura

Born in Spain, now in Australia. This is my little, Internet space.

Hi! As you probably guessed, I’m Alberto Roura, the one writing here since 2002.

As a matter of fact my name could be Alberto Roura Martínez Formoso Serrano Vieta Olmeda Ballesteros Bermejo Paz Córdoba Porrúa Elvira Gili Cuesta Longa Garrote González Del Saz. Yep, 18 surnames, the history of my family can be tracked all the way to the 17th century and I find great enjoyment in learning about my roots and where I come from.

6 years old / 1994

Coding, contrary to many people, came more natural for me. I started programming on the ZX Spectrum +2 my family had at home. I suppose you could say I spent half my time learning cursive and the other half smashing code, so it’s kind of a second language for me. You could think that’s the reason I love being in IT so much, but there is more: As technology is always changing, I can fulfil my dream to never stop learning, growing and improving. Working in this industry makes me regularly learn new frameworks and platforms to optimize resource usage and ingenious ways to solve problems.

12 years old / 2000

The year I discovered Linux! After using Windows 3.11, 95, 98 I gave a try to OS/2 Warp 4, as it made everything feel more stable, and I was able to focus on my stuff more than just “making Windows work“. But the big revelation came in the year 2000 when I got a CD of “Hispafuentes Linux” 7.0, a very well-made Red Hat-based distro developed in Madrid, Spain. From that first distribution I kept jumping through several ones like Mandrake, Knoppix, Gentoo, SUSE and finally landed on Debian Potato. This made Debian my all-time favourite, still using it nowadays.

Later on, in 2006, that gave me the opportunity to run a regional LUG (Linux User Group) in the Basque Country where we were able to organise 2 events with Richard Stallman. Apart from this, I worked on a very cool project called TuxSM, a Linux port for phones before Android was even a thing.

14 years old / 2002

I learnt HTML and created my very first site. By using a very simple text editor and lots of spare time I somehow created a simple site with some pictures, links and random stuff for me and my friends.

Said site, in 2003, evolved into this website after learning CSS & PHP. Programming made me curious and, thanks to a family friend (who started an early “cloud computing” company in the 90s) I was able to get my hands on several mainframes and networking devices.

Finally, in 2007, I had my first home server, an HP NetServer E45. This website, albertoroura.com, started to be hosted from my own room under a Dynamic IP, where I had a plethora of routers, switches, hubs and Wi-Fi access points. You can imagine how much fun I had creating networks and testing all kinds of attacks, tests and security-related stuff.

As a side note, in 2009, this helped me build a startup called “Track’n’View“, where I manufactured low-consumption vehicle-tracking devices, making IoT before it was cool.

22 years old / 2010

Volunteering in “Guifi.net” (A community with over 37k active nodes and about 71,000 km of wireless links), I helped bring Internet to remote areas by using mesh networking, solar-powered APs and many, many PoE antennas. It was gratifying to see remote rural councils fully connected to the main cities around.

23 years old / 2011

My first successful online adventure! I ran an e-commerce site around the digital camera space, “elfotometrodigital.com“. This site had a technical blog, supported bookings for 1-to-1 photography courses and a shop, where I mixed drop-shipping with local stock for the best-selling products. I was amazed how, with no investment in advertising at all, the site got so many sales just by word of mouth, quality blog posts and good SEO.

26 years old / 2014

I moved to Australia and had a once-in-a-lifetime experience around the Asia-Pacific region. Living and working in that area of the world exposed me to countless new ways of doing things, observing life and thinking outside the box. Being away from home for so long also made me start my own business adventure with guztia.com. I worked for amazing companies in all Europe, America, Australia, China, Singapore, Malaysia & Thailand.

29 years old / 2017

I got some recognition from the 3rd biggest cloud provider in the world, Alibaba Cloud, by receiving the MVP (Most Valued Professional) award in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 & 2023, being the only person to achieve this so far. Apart from this, I’ve been the top #1 go-to person globally since 2019 in terms of Chinese cross-border communications.

35 years old / 2023 – What keeps me busy right now?

  • Volunteering in SBS, an Australian public service broadcaster
  • Volunteering in 4EB, Brisbane’s ethnic community radio station
  • Volunteering in TASSCA, The Australian Spanish Socio-Cultural Association
  • Offering APAC-centred Cloud services & China website acceleration with Guztia
  • Helping non-tech-savvy artists around the world to create their NFTs with NFTool
  • Funding Open Source development with NFTs
  • Keeping the Software as reliable as possible at Studio None
  • Doing some research around food security with AgriTech & IoT on rice paddies in Thailand

What is this site about?

This site is a long-term project for me, and is where I keep in writing everything worth sharing.

It also helps me to store weird, random information like this hexadecimal thingy or my GPG key.

You can think of it as my way to keep some order in my thoughts. At the end of the day, who knows, maybe someone else is interested in all this stuff.

I guess I was just born with a curiosity about everything surrounding me, so I try to learn about everything I touch.

I have a strong inclination towards entrepreneurship and find great enjoyment in the process of conceiving and realizing new ideas.

Open Source projects I collaborated with:

As part of my personal and professional development, I make an effort to contribute to the community through the development of open source projects. Some examples of notable open source projects that I have contributed to include:

Looking For Cloud Consulting?

I specialize in Chinese & APAC Clouds, ICP License Filing, China cross-border communications and will help you architect the most suitable solution for your business needs, including Site Acceleration in China with single and multicloud approaches.

If you need help on deploying with Alibaba Cloud or any of the above topics, you can also check in more detail the services I offer on Cloud Consulting.