About
A somewhat unorthodox path through teaching, development, data, technical documentation and digital exploration, with more internal continuity than it may seem at first glance.
Profile
I am José Ángel Heras: a vocational IT teacher, a physicist by training, a former marine geophysicist and a developer who is far more practical than ceremonial.
My work spans:
- Applied Physics and Geophysics
- Instrumentation
- Programming
- Data acquisition, processing and visualisation
- Seafloor mapping
- Web development
- Cybersecurity
- Artificial intelligence
- Teaching
I do not present this as an ornamental collection of labels. It is a fairly accurate description of how I ended up working: crossing disciplines when the problem calls for it and using whichever tool best resolves the friction at hand.
I have worked in scientific, technical and educational settings, and that has left a clear mark on how I think. I care about precision, usefulness and context, as well as the kind of curiosity that prevents work from becoming a sequence of automatic gestures.
My career has not been linear, but neither has it been arbitrary. If anything connects its different stages, it is a tendency to understand complex systems, turn them into something manageable and convert that work into tools, materials or decisions that are genuinely useful to other people.
I come from a world in which measuring badly, interpreting badly or documenting badly could have serious consequences. That is probably why I distrust technical grandstanding, fashions that replace judgement with enthusiasm, and complexity presented as a virtue in itself.
I am more interested in thoughtful work than surface gloss. And I care much more that things can be explained and used by people who are not necessarily—or excessively—technical, as well as that they work.
What I do and how I do it
Technical education is now my centre of gravity, but I do not treat it as a sealed compartment. Teaching programming, systems, networks, deployment or AI makes more sense when it is connected to real problems, real tools and a certain culture of work done properly.
That leads me quite naturally across several layers: designing materials, building small websites or prototypes, automating tasks, organising data, writing documentation, testing new tools and deciding what value they actually offer before bringing them into the classroom or daily work.
I am not obsessed with being everywhere or touching every technology. I am more interested in distinguishing what deserves attention, what can be simplified and what is best left out. There is probably as much teaching judgement as technical judgement in that.
Working principle
I prefer sober, understandable and maintainable systems. If a tool complicates more than it clarifies, or a technical fashion demands more ritual than results, it quickly loses my interest.
I work best with a reasonable mix of rigour, autonomy and room to think. And I tend to trust a well-explained, repeatable solution more than a supposedly brilliant display of complexity.