I taught myself to code, then built an entire company's data infrastructure from scratch.

I'm Franccesco Orozco, a Data Lead based in Costa Rica. I didn't come through a CS degree or a bootcamp. I started as a Web Research Specialist at Straive in 2014, spending my days sifting through information for clients. Somewhere in those late nights I discovered Python, and the curiosity stuck. I taught myself to code by building things nobody asked me to build. One of those projects was GSAN, a security reconnaissance tool that ended up earning 300+ stars on GitHub. That repo became my resume.

In 2019, Bloom Growth hired me as a Python developer on the strength of that open-source work. When I got there, I found a company running on Excel sheets with no real data infrastructure. Nobody else was touching the data side. Instead of waiting for someone to fix it, I decided I would be that someone. I spent eight months studying data engineering on DataCamp while working full-time, then started building.

What came next was a one-person infrastructure project. I designed and deployed the company's entire modern data stack: Snowflake as the warehouse, Fivetran for ingestion, dbt for transformations, Hightouch for reverse ETL, and Hex for analytics and reporting. All the Python glue code, all the pipeline orchestration, all the data modeling. One engineer, zero hand-holding.

Then I went further. I built Scout, an agentic AI data analyst that lives in Slack and queries the full data stack through natural language. Anyone at the company can ask Scout a question and get an answer backed by real data, no SQL required. It turned data from a bottleneck into a self-serve resource for every team.

That work caught the attention of Hex, the analytics platform. I collaborated with their team to give feedback on their AI agent, and they published my writing on hex.tech. These days, I lead data at Bloom Growth, continue shipping open-source tools, and write about data engineering, AI, and the messy reality of building things that actually work.