From unloading coffee sacks in a small town in Risaralda, to policing the streets of Colombia, to cleaning floors at the University of Westminster — and graduating First Class Honours from that same building.
That journey shaped everything I do. From London to Colombia, I've built software products, published 11+ books, taught thousands of students, and launched businesses. I believe in the power of relentless curiosity, disciplined execution, and sharing knowledge freely.
Today I work at the intersection of technology, education, and entrepreneurship — building tools that solve real problems and teaching the next generation of builders.
From a coffee town in Risaralda to building across continents
First jobs as a teenager in a small coffee town in Risaralda, Colombia. Unloaded heavy sacks of coffee and plantain from jeeps at a café agency during weekends, and waited tables at a local café — all while studying secondary school.
Straight out of secondary school, turned a passion for traditional Colombian folk dance into teaching. Led classes and performed, building early skills in leadership, discipline, and cultural expression.
Joined the Colombian National Police. Completed one year of training as Patrullero, followed by two years of service as a professional police officer — learning discipline, structure, and public service.
Emigrated to London from Colombia without a word of English. Took the first job I could find — cleaning floors at the University of Westminster — and started learning the language the way a child does: by listening, failing, and trying again. Seven years later, I would graduate from that same building with First Class Honours.
Enrolled in BSc Mobile Communications Engineering at the University of Westminster — trading the mop for a lecture hall in the same building. Graduated four years later with First Class Honours.
Started freelancing, building websites and web applications for small businesses in London.
Joined Urban WiMAX in London as an intern in my final year at Westminster — in less than six months I was hired as a Radio Frequency Engineer, formalised as an Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership role jointly with Westminster. Two years building line-of-sight coverage models across millions of London rooftops; became an accredited WiMAX Forum expert in broadband telecom and RF. Later authored a book on the subject.
Completed the Master of Business Administration in Entrepreneurship at the University of Wales Lampeter (2009–2010), blending engineering with business strategy.
Came home to Colombia at the end of 2010, straight after completing the MBA in London — to teach at universities, launch ventures in education and technology, and begin laying the groundwork for what would become Ciudad Bilingüe.
Began publishing career with books on business, cryptocurrency, and emotional intelligence. Now 11+ titles on Amazon.
Co-founded Ciudad Bilingüe in Pereira, Colombia — a bilingual academy built around the Active Speaking Method. I have been its Director ever since, running the school in parallel with the other ventures and platforms that grew out of it. Eleven years in, the academy has graduated 1,000+ students and become the anchor for an ecosystem of products (CRM, Talky, Axiom).
Earned Intellectual Property Diploma from Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, adding legal expertise to the toolkit.
Began building Talky — now an AI-powered language learning platform spanning 9 languages, 140+ curriculum books, and a custom ESP32 voice device (TutorPal) — alongside Axiom, the human-in-the-loop AI assistant that runs the business from WhatsApp. After six years of development and a full year of content testing through 2026, Talky launches publicly later this year.
Built GeoRef — a real-time field-operations map with role-based views — and La Lupa, an AI-powered civic intelligence platform that now holds 549 verified cases of Colombian public wrongdoing at lalupa.com.co. Both still active and being expanded through 2026.
Working through the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate (Coursera) since 2025 — sharpening data-driven decision-making and digital-strategy capabilities across the portfolio.
End-to-end systems — designed, architected, and shipped. From AI engines to IoT devices.
A CEFR-aligned language learning universe — 9 languages, 8 Professional English tracks, and an ambient voice device
Talky is a research-grade language-learning platform used by real schools and families. An adaptive AI tutor teaches 9 languages across a CEFR-aligned curriculum (A1→C2), with a 25-band difficulty engine that keeps each learner in the 75% accuracy “flow zone.” Beyond general language, Talky now houses 8 Professional English tracks — Business, Interview Prep, Tourism, Aviation, Legal, Medical, Engineering, and Nursing — each a B1–B2 Language for Specific Purposes module. Kids step into AR worlds with animated characters; adults enter live classroom mode with up to 50 students, real-time leaderboards, and video tutoring. And when the phone goes away, there’s TutorPal — a custom ESP32 voice device I designed for ambient at-home practice. 140+ curriculum books, 75,000+ Q&A items, a 3-layer speech evaluation cascade, and emotion-aware coaching.
Read the full Talky deep dive ↓Jarvis for a real education business — AI operations over WhatsApp
Axiom is the AI operations brain for a real education company, reached through a single WhatsApp chat. It reasons with Claude, then acts across Google Workspace, the CRM, Canva, and local systems — drafting emails, moving calendar events, pulling student data, generating invoice PDFs, creating visuals. Every sensitive action is gated behind human approval, so nothing fires without a conscious “yes.” It's been running on Firebase Cloud Functions 24/7 since early 2026, quietly removing hours of routine work from the business every week.
Operating system for a bilingual academy — 41 modules, 4 roles, GPS-validated attendance
The operational spine of Ciudad Bilingüe. 41 modules covering every corner of running a school: enrollment, scheduling, GPS-validated attendance (500m radius), multi-currency payments with a full audit trail, payroll across three institutions, director analytics, and real-time reconciliation. Role-based permissions change the entire UI per user — teachers see one world, salespeople another, the director sees everything. Same app, four experiences. Live in production today.
Turning scattered corruption reports into institutional memory for Colombia
La Lupa is a civic transparency platform that reads the news so citizens don't have to. Claude AI scans 7+ Colombian news sources four times a day, categorizes findings into nine types of public wrongdoing — corruption, abuse of power, contract fraud, misuse of public resources — deduplicates via semantic similarity, then routes them to an admin approval queue before they go public. The database now holds 549 verified cases and 19 deep-dive opinion articles documenting over $70B in exposed scandals. Live at lalupa.com.co.
A mood dial for the news — slide from “only positive” to “raw reality”
MindfulNews puts one strange idea at the center: most people don't want to block the news, they want to choose how much darkness they consume. A single mood dial (0–100) filters in real time as you slide, backed by AI sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and keyword-level blocklists for people, topics, or outlets. Aggregates 25+ English and Spanish sources across four Latin American countries, with on-demand AI summaries in your language. Ships as a Next.js web app and a React Native mobile app that stay in sync.
Turning a territory into a living, real-time map
GeoRef takes field operations and makes them visual. Leaders draw zones, assign teams, drop contacts on the map, and watch data sync live across admin, leader, and field-agent views — each role seeing only what they need. Automated geocoding turns addresses into pins; CSV export turns the map back into a business document.
English for taxi drivers in Colombia’s coffee region — so the first face of tourism speaks the traveler’s language
When a foreign traveler lands in Pereira to see Colombia’s coffee region, the first person they meet is almost always a taxi driver. TaxiTutor is an AI-guided English tutor built specifically for those drivers — an academically designed curriculum covering coffee culture, regional tourism, customer service, and the specific language of the driver’s trade (directions, fares, small talk, hotel pickups, airport runs). The app runs conversational sessions where the driver speaks, the AI responds, corrects, and gradually levels up the difficulty — turning dead time between trips into paid-off practice, and turning a ride from the airport into a genuinely bilingual welcome to the coffee region.
A bilingual academy I co-founded in Pereira — the front door to the whole ecosystem
Ciudad Bilingüe is the real-world English academy I co-founded in 2015 and have directed ever since from Pereira, Colombia. The website is built on Next.js 14 with SEO-optimized landing pages, blog articles, and “Bili” — a Claude-powered AI chatbot that answers questions about courses and lets staff take over the conversation in real time when a human touch is needed. This is the top of the funnel: visitors become leads in the CRM, students get provisioned into Talky, and Axiom handles their invoices. 11 years running, 1,000+ graduates, 4.7 stars across 125 Google reviews.
A campaign platform where every community leader becomes their own invite code
Designed and built for Durguez Espinosa's 2026 run for the Colombian Cámara de Representantes — a campaign I supported across design, strategy, and engineering. The central idea is simple and distinctly grassroots: each campaign leader's phone number doubles as their personal invite code, so every supporter who registers is attributed back to a real person in a real neighborhood. A live admin dashboard shows who brought whom, segments by territory, and exports voter lists on demand. 5,000+ users passed through the platform in the lead-up to a March 3, 2026 virtual event.
Personal branding for a Colombian lawyer and public servant
A professional portfolio built for Julián Andrés Ospina Posada — a Colombian lawyer stepping into public life. Custom design system in navy and gold, a biographical timeline that tells the story of a career, 12 categorized achievements with filters, and a lightweight static blog engine for long-form writing. Clean, fast, and designed to be taken seriously by institutions and voters alike.
A luxury dental practice, reimagined in typography and light
A digital home for Dr. Xiomara Bolívar's dental practice — orthodontics, implants, smile design, aesthetics. I leaned into quiet luxury: a Cormorant Garamond display serif, warm gold-and-cream palette, radial gradients that feel like studio lighting, and full bilingual Spanish/English infrastructure. Designed to reassure before a single word is read. Live at xiomarabolivar.com.
Dozens of sites designed and shipped — personal, civic, and client
In parallel with the platform work, I design and ship a steady stream of websites for my own ventures and for external clients. Recent examples include alexanderom.co (this portfolio), lalupa.com.co, and ciudadbilingue.com — plus the Julián Ospina and Xiomara Bolívar projects above, and many more personal brands, civic tools, and small-business sites across Colombia not individually listed here.
Free financial calculators for everyone — no login, no fees, no tracking
KuboMoney was born from a simple frustration: every good financial calculator either charges, requires a sign-up, or sells your data. So we built the opposite. 20 purpose-built calculators — mortgage, compound interest, retirement, debt-to-income, auto loan, credit card payoff, home affordability, business startup cost, tax withholding, and more — all running entirely in the browser, with zero data storage. Wrapped around them is a programmatic SEO layer of 349 pages covering all 50 US states and 50 major cities with real salary, cost-of-living, and tax data, so people actually find the tool when they’re making a real financial decision. Co-founded with Vanessa Ocampo. Live at kubomoney.com.
Built end to end: 9 conversational languages, 8 Professional English tracks, CEFR-aligned pedagogy, a 25-band adaptive difficulty engine, a 3-layer speech evaluation cascade, an ambient IoT voice device, and a live 50-student classroom mode.
Each track is a self-contained 40-unit B1–B2 module, built around domain-specific vocabulary, scenario-based practice, and the genuine registers a professional uses at work. Tracks run in parallel with the general A1–C2 curriculum, so a learner can hold Book 5 (general A2) alongside Book 901 (Business B1).
Talky is a live testbed for applied-linguistics and CALL questions. Because every interaction is logged against a CEFR-aligned taxonomy and an explicit difficulty band, the platform can host controlled interventions at real scale.
The 25-band engine already targets a 75% flow-zone. Randomized-assignment studies could measure whether ZPD-targeted sequencing outperforms a fixed A1→C2 path on retention and CEFR checkpoint pass rates.
Talky’s 3-layer cascade (exact match → local grammar + keyword analysis → AI judge) composites keywords (50%), similarity (30%), length (10%), and grammar (10%), and hard-caps meaning errors. Research question: does this rubric-aligned score correlate better with teacher judgments than acoustic STT confidence?
TutorPal enables asynchronous, device-mediated language exposure at home. This is novel territory for ubiquitous CALL: does short-burst ambient exposure between app sessions meaningfully boost retention of B1 vocabulary?
Emotional-state signals (motivation, confidence, frustration) are already captured and shape coaching persona. A study could test whether emotion-adaptive coaching raises weekly session counts over a 12-week window, and whether the effect is stronger in Professional English tracks.
Parallel EN / FR / ES curricula make L1-transfer effects observable at scale. Where does positive transfer accelerate progression, and where does interference slow it? A Polylang / Talky partnership could produce publishable answers.
Talky’s turn-based classroom gives all 50 students speaking time, not only those who raise a hand. A natural experiment: compare L2 output volume and accuracy gains against traditional call-on-hand classrooms.
11+ titles on Amazon covering business, crypto, emotional intelligence, and academia
University of Westminster, London
2004 — 2008University of Wales Lampeter
2009 — 2010Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB)
2018WiMAX Forum
2009Google / Coursera
2025 — presentWhether you're looking for a collaborator, a speaker, or just want to connect — I'd love to hear from you.