Germán Méndez Bravo

Software Engineer | Systems & Infrastructure at Scale | Python & C++ | Technical Innovator

About Me

Hey there! I’m Germán Méndez Bravo, though you might’ve crossed paths with me online as Kronuz. If you’re curious enough to be here, grab your favorite beverage and let me tell you a story.

My affair with technology kicked off as a bright-eyed kid in Mexico City, somewhere in the chaotic glow of the late ’80s. Imagine a 10-year-old me, hunched over a monochrome CRT screen, fingers dancing awkwardly on a stiff keyboard, trying to figure out how to make that mysterious blinking cursor do my bidding. Those early lines of BASIC opened doors I never knew existed, and I’ve been chasing that magic ever since.

Growing up through the vibrant yet strangely peaceful ’80s and ’90s, my fascination quickly spiraled outward. Dialing into BBSes like “Tierras Extrañas”, Coyoacán BBS, and Tornado BBS became my early digital playgrounds, places full of file archives, ANSI art, online games, and electronic magazines. I still remember the thrill of Xmodem, Ymodem, and Zmodem transfers slowly counting up like a secret ritual, where ASCII art and slow modem handshakes felt like secret portals into alternate universes. Alongside my cousin Victor, I crafted what we cheekily called a “digital ouija,” a playful little hack that could make answers appear seemingly from nowhere, startling and delighting our friends into questioning reality itself and having lots of fun in the process.

During my university years at Instituto Tecnológico de Morelia, my projects always seemed to surprise professors and classmates alike. One early standout was a simple yet captivating adventure game, so advanced for the curriculum that it sparked disbelief among faculty, leading to months of detailed explanations and demonstrations. Other memorable projects included building a functional sound card connected through a parallel port, and visually-rich demonstrations of classic computing problems like the Dining Philosophers Problem, complete with graphics I crafted using 3D Studio Max.

My adventurous spirit found camaraderie in the hacking escapades of legends like Kevin Mitnick, whose daring exploits inspired me to reverse-engineer software and peek beneath digital hoods with disassemblers and magical debuggers like SoftICE. Around this time, I started contributing to DOSBox, where I worked not just on graphical scalers, but on a deeper optimization that significantly boosted performance. Instead of redrawing the entire screen frame by frame, I modified the rendering system to avoid drawing pixels that hadn’t changed, a crucial improvement given how expensive drawing was in a fully emulated environment. This technique became even more impactful when combined with scalers, which made drawing operations even slower. The result were stunning speed-ups that made it possible to run games previously thought unplayable due to abysmal frame rates. It was one of those rare little miracles that made me feel I had reached back in time and dusted off a piece of computing history, pixel by pixel.

My first significant dive into advanced C++ was a custom game engine initially called Open Zelda, later renamed Open Legends after a gentle nudge from Nintendo. It featured a full-blown world editor (built with the Windows Template Library (WTL)) and scripted all in-game entities using Pawn. I used Direct3D for rendering, and I still remember spending hours placing tiles, tweaking sprites, and obsessing over movement logic. You can view the original SourceForge project here. This ambitious project taught me countless algorithms and immersed me in books on Design Patterns, advanced C++, game development, and even the works of Donald Knuth. It was challenging, rewarding, and instrumental in shaping me as a programmer.

I also worked on numerous open-source projects, like esprima-python, metch, stacktraces, base-x, uinteger_t, and Django Polymorphic, as well as submitting patches and contributions to Django itself and many other projects. I also authored ISN for PostgreSQL, a PostgreSQL extension to handle International Standard Numbers. These tools have been quietly helping developers around the world for years.

My professional career solidified when I co-founded startups, Deipi and later Dubalu, which became crucial chapters in my journey. At Dubalu, as CTO, I led the technical vision, mentoring multiple cross-functional teams and engineers. We built robust and scalable systems, including Xapiand, a blazing-fast, distributed search engine lovingly crafted in C++.

In early 2020, life took another big twist. With excitement, a fair dose of fear, and bittersweet feelings from stepping away from Dubalu and the incredible team we had built together, I moved with my family to Silicon Valley, stepping into the unknown to join Meta. Just a month after arriving, the world changed dramatically with COVID-19, and suddenly we found ourselves locked down, navigating life in a completely new place. Amidst this chaos, I created Lazy Imports, a clever runtime optimization with outsized impact. It dramatically sped up Instagram servers and reduced memory footprints across Meta, ultimately sparking fierce debates in the Python community and resulting in PEP 690. It was humbling and exhilarating to watch such a small tweak ripple across systems at global scale.

Throughout my career, I’ve explored and mastered various languages and technologies, from my beloved C++ and Python to JavaScript, PostgreSQL, and even Java (though we’re still not friends). I’ve built impactful open-source tools like pyScss, a Python SCSS compiler, and SublimeCodeIntel, enhancing code intelligence for developers everywhere.

Yet beneath all the big names and bigger tech remains the curious kid from Mexico City, fascinated by the intricate dance of electrons and bits. Each project, each line of code, is an echo of that initial excitement, sometimes a little puzzle box, a small rebellion against boredom, a quest to understand the universe hidden behind the screen.

These days, you’ll catch me coding, exploring California with my family, endlessly tinkering on personal projects, or buried in a great book. And yes, occasionally you’ll even find me tweeting or sharing quirky commits on GitHub or LinkedIn. I’m always open to working on meaningful tools or systems that push boundaries. Feel free to reach out if something resonates. I promise I’m friendlier than a Java garbage collector.