About

Hello!

I'm Alejandro Rangel, a Technical Engineering Lead at Fender Musical Instruments Corporation in Los Angeles. I've been writing code since I was 10, and over the past 15+ years I've worked across mobile, web, cloud, and AI — from university research labs to products used by millions of musicians.

At Fender

I’ve been at Fender for over 10 years, growing from Senior Mobile/Web Developer to Technical Engineering Lead. That journey gave me hands-on experience across every layer of the stack: iOS (Swift, Objective-C), Android (Java, Kotlin), Node.js/TypeScript, Python, and AWS.

Some of the products I’ve helped ship include Fender Play (the guitar learning platform), Fender Tune, Fender Tone, and the Tone Master Pro digital amp modeler.

These days I’m focused on AI-assisted development — building internal tooling and frameworks that harness LLMs to improve engineering velocity and code quality. This builds on a foundation in ML — I completed Stanford’s Machine Learning course taught by Andrew Ng, covering supervised and unsupervised learning, neural networks, and best practices for building ML systems. That background has been key to understanding what’s actually happening under the hood of the LLMs I work with daily.

Research & Publications

Before joining Fender, I worked as an Undergraduate Research Assistant at UC Irvine’s Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction, building Android apps involving augmented reality, geolocation, and activity estimation. I also developed research applications at CICESE Research Center in Mexico.

That work resulted in two published papers:

• MOSOCO: A Mobile Assistive Tool to Support Children with Autism Practicing Social Skills in Real-Life Situations — CHI’12. We built an augmented reality tool that helped children with autism practice social skills, and our study showed it increased both the quantity and quality of their social interactions.
• Self-Configurable Activities in Activity-Aware Computing: The Case of Autism — UCAMI’11. Introduced the concept of self-configurable activities for context-aware applications.

That intersection of human-computer interaction and real-world impact still drives how I think about building software. I also hold an HCI certification from the Interaction Design Foundation.

Education

• Graduate studies in Computer Science — CICESE, Ensenada, 2013–2015
• B.Sc. in Computer Science — Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, 2007–2011

Beyond Work

I’m a native Spanish speaker, professionally fluent in English, and a contributor to open source through the Apache OpenOffice project. I’m always curious about what’s next — whether that’s a new framework, a new model architecture, or a new way to make tools that help people.

You can find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, and Stack Overflow.

About This Blog

Where did the name come from? Honestly, I don’t remember. I created this blog in 2016 and didn’t touch it for years. I think it came from the Netflix show Love Death + Robots.