Federico Ramallo
Founder, author, and podcast host
I build engineering teams and companies across borders, and I write about the ideas underneath both, from cross-border leadership to Austrian economics. I shipped my first line of production code at 15 and joined Microsoft as an engineer at 16. The thesis I have worked from ever since: the teams, and the writers, that win are the ones with the deepest context, not the loudest tools.
Books and writing
- The Invisible Distance (2026). A field manual for engineering leaders running teams across borders. Not a remote work book and not an outsourcing book, the operating system underneath both.
- De Menger a Milei / From Menger to Milei. Austrian economics for a general reader, tracing the ideas from Carl Menger and the School of Salamanca through to Javier Milei.
- No hay plata en la isla de las ratas / No Silver on Rat Island. A libertarian animal fable about a community that loses its freedom as it loses its sound money. Book 1 of the Isla de la Libertad series.
- La riqueza de la isla / The Wealth of the Island. A children's fable that introduces Adam Smith's ideas to readers ages 8 to 12.
- Open the Valve / Abre la Válvula. Co-authored with John Klymshyn and Isaac Naor, on creativity as a daily practice.
Experience
Founded and still run Density Labs, the embedded engineering partner behind production software at mid-market US companies. The Density Method, a 12-phase operating system across Plan, Build, and Ship. 96% client retention since 2016, with the longest client partnership now in its tenth year.
150+ conversations with engineering leaders about scaling, leading, and building teams that last. Guests include operators and founders from Ascendion, Roku, Cisco Meraki, AppOmni, and Shopify.
Tooling for AI-assisted engineer matching, the productized arm of Density Labs.
Built the team from one to twenty full-stack engineers using pair programming and a structured training program that scaled the skills of more than fifty developers. This set the foundation for what became Density Labs.
Mentored aspiring developers in JavaScript and Ruby on Rails, moving dozens of career changers into productive software engineering careers.
Full-stack Rails work at Translation Exchange, Citivox, and Crowd Interactive, including the ModCloth e-commerce platform. Earlier still, I joined Microsoft as an engineer as a teenager and demoed software to executives at one of Argentina's largest telecoms.
Focus and skills
Ruby on Rails, AI and large language models in production, software architecture, engineering management, and building distributed and cross-border teams. Alongside the engineering, a decade of writing and speaking for both technical and general audiences.
Links
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