About

I’m Néstor. I grew up in the Basque Country, have lived in Berlin for over fifteen years, and lead the team that builds uKonn-X at Murrelektronik. I got here by a route that makes sense mostly in hindsight: philosophy, then translation, then software.

Philosophy

I studied philosophy in Barcelona, San Sebastian and Madrid and later did a master’s in media studies in Germany. I started a PhD and left it. What I kept was the habit that drew me to the subject in the first place: asking what a claim actually means, and what would have to be true for it to hold.

That habit turned out to be more useful in engineering than I expected. Most problems on a software team are not technical at the start. They are unclear questions.

Translation

For about ten years I worked as a freelance technical translator for companies like Google, Microsoft, SAP and Volkswagen. Translation is slow, close reading for a living. You learn quickly that most texts are less clear than their authors believe, and that the reader pays for it.

Then the machines got good. Not good enough to replace a translator, but good enough to change what one was paid for. The work shifted from writing to correcting, the rates followed, and a profession I had been good at for a decade stopped being one I could build a life on. I left in 2023.

Engineering and leading a team

So I retrained as a developer. I joined Murrelektronik as a frontend developer in 2024 and became team lead a year later. Today I lead five people across development, DevOps and design. We build uKonn-X, a digital guide for installing and servicing industrial machines. It won the DINNO Award in 2025 and launched commercially in March 2026.

Most of my work now is making it easier for other people to do theirs: a structured onboarding for new developers, a review format that starts with context instead of features, and guidelines for how we use AI in development.

What I write about

I write about building software, leading people, and what AI changes about both. I have some history with the question. I have already watched AI rearrange one profession from the inside, and I now lead a team in another one where the same thing is beginning. The pattern is familiar: the tool doesn’t take the job, it takes the part of the job that was paid well, and leaves the responsibility.

So I’m less interested in what the tools can do than in what they do to the work: who is responsible for code nobody typed, what a junior developer still needs to learn, what a team lead is for when the output is cheap. I don’t have settled answers. Writing is how I work towards them.

If any of this overlaps with what you’re working on, write to me at hello@nestoririondo.com.