Curriculum vitae · Manuel Almagro

You can download my CV as a PDF here.

This page used to contain a plain-text version of my CV. No one read it, so I have decided to use this space to do something a bit different.

Consultancy sounds like a buzzword sometimes, and SAP looks like a great, blue, German monolith from the outside. So instead of throwing ATS-optimised keywords around, I will try to explain clearly what my professional life looks like.

Here you can learn a bit about me, explore my area of expertise, see what I do in practice, and find out what I want to do next.

Who am I?

My name is Manuel. I studied physics, but I no longer think about wavefunctions. There is a section where you can get to know me a bit better.
I work in integration.

What is integration?

As companies grow, they adopt systems that were never designed to talk to one another. Integration bridges those gaps, allowing systems to exchange information and work together. It might sound boring, but the problems involved can be surprisingly interesting.
Nowadays, most companies rely on integration platforms to handle many of the recurring challenges of distributed systems: retries, idempotency, queuing, logging, ordering, etc. Most of my work (and therefore my muscle memory) revolves around SAP’s approach to integration, with its own tools, patterns and conventions. You can read about them in my CV.
Behind all this lies a messy combination of protocols, message formats, authentication methods and potential failure modes. A good integration specialist needs to understand more than just integration tools: infrastructure, cybersecurity, architecture, development, functional processes and even cost optimisation all come into play. That variety is what makes the field interesting to me.

What is it that I actually do?

My working life has much the same structure as any technology consultant’s: I work on projects for other companies, sometimes providing advice, but more often making architectural decisions, developing integrations and/or improving existing ones.

The balance varies from day to day, but a rough breakdown looks like this:

10–20% helping colleagues with problems they have run into.
10–20% reading documentation, keeping up with new developments or learning a tool/framework I might need.
20–30% talking to colleagues and clients to understand what needs doing and what some process actually looks like.
30–40% developing, testing and documenting integrations.

SAP consultancy has a way of rearranging your day. Things often go differently than expected, but most projects are manageable and get done without (major) headaches.

The amount of time spent talking is deliberate. Once you have reached a certain level of competence, you find that most integration problems are functional or human in nature rather than technical: what the process is actually like, who owns what, what happens when things go wrong, and so on. The technical part is, to be honest, the most fun and the easiest to handle. A former boss of mine said that we are not building rockets, just sending messages around. While that may be an oversimplification for the sake of sanity, it is essentially true.

What do I want to do?

I have seen many failure modes. I have had to live with the consequences of my choices (which, admittedly, seem to have been rather adequate). I have also had some excellent mentors. As a result I can design integrations that work reliably, and I have made architectural decisions that hold up in prod. My goal is to become an integration architect without losing sight of the fun part (building). I dread the increasing importance of PowerPoint, though, as I have seen what it can do to those in the higher architectural spheres.
I tend to get bored once things stop being technically challenging. There are also areas I miss working in or wish I could explore further: cybersecurity, cloud application development, teaching others about SAP integration… but you have to pick your battles. Still, if an opportunity came along that allowed me to get more involved in any of these areas, I might consider it.

You can find the specific technologies and procedures I know in my CV. Do not hesitate to send me an email if any of this sounds interesting to you!