Professional Experience

Warava — PropTech Real Estate Platform

• React
• Bootstrap
• Python
• Django
• FastAPI
• Figma
• Jira
• Bitbucket

Description

Warava is a PropTech platform built in partnership with Hogares ISN, one of Guatemala's largest residential real estate companies, to modernize how prospective buyers discover and evaluate property. The default in this market was a sales agent or a static listing sheet as the only way to compare homes, apartments, and offices; Warava's job was to move that comparison online — letting a buyer search, filter, and shortlist properties on their own terms, while giving Hogares ISN a digital storefront for its inventory and a new, measurable channel into its sales pipeline.

As a Software Developer Intern (January – June 2019), I worked across the stack on an established product: responsive React/Bootstrap interfaces on the frontend, Django and FastAPI services on the backend, and the discipline of shipping inside someone else's codebase and design system rather than a blank canvas — turning Figma mockups into production components and delivering through the team's existing Agile process.

What It Let Buyers Do

• Search and filter across residential and commercial listings — homes, apartments, and offices — instead of paging through an undifferentiated inventory
• Explore detailed listings with interactive image galleries and location context
• Compare properties side by side while narrowing toward a shortlist
• Move from browsing to genuine evaluation of a specific property without a sales agent as the only intermediary

On the business side, that same interface was Hogares ISN's inventory showcase: every listing presented clearly and easy to find translated directly into engagement, and engagement was the top of the funnel the platform existed to feed.

Key Responsibilities & Achievements

• Shipped user-facing features for property search, exploration, and evaluation across residential and commercial listings, moving the platform's usability and engagement forward one release at a time.
• Built responsive, reusable React/Bootstrap components that kept search, listing, and detail pages visually consistent and made new pages a matter of composition rather than rebuilding UI from scratch.
• Partnered closely with design in Figma, converting mockups into production-ready components with the fidelity that keeps a design-to-development handoff trustworthy instead of something that quietly drifts page by page.
• Built and integrated backend services and REST APIs in Python across Django and FastAPI, supporting data management and reliable frontend-backend communication as the feature set grew.
• Optimized frontend performance — component structure, rendering behavior, state handling — cutting load times on the image- and listing-heavy pages where sluggishness costs engagement directly.
• Delivered inside the team's Agile workflow, using Jira for planning and Bitbucket for version control and code review, and learning to work within existing conventions rather than code in isolation.

Tech Stack

Key Learnings

A component library is only as good as its consistency discipline. Building reusable React/Bootstrap components across dozens of property listings made clear how much faster a page comes together once the design system is trusted, versus re-deriving spacing and structure by eye on every new screen.

Design-to-development handoff is a skill of its own. Translating Figma mockups faithfully — not just visually close, but matching spacing, states, and responsive behavior — was as much a discipline to learn as any framework, and sloppy handoff shows up immediately once real data hits the layout.

Running two Python web frameworks side by side (Django, FastAPI) taught me to read why a service exists before assuming its shape. Django's batteries-included structure and FastAPI's lighter, async-friendly style solve different problems — an early lesson in matching the tool to the job instead of defaulting to whatever framework I'd already used.