Santiago Fernández de Valderrama

I build and maintain career-ops, the open-source job search agent that runs on the user's own machine. I spent sixteen years running a device repair business in Seville before software took over my life; I built career-ops for my own job search, then open-sourced it under MIT when I no longer needed it. Four months later it has 68,000+ stars, 329 contributors and a community of 4,600+ people. I maintain it on evenings and weekends around other work, and funding buys the project deeper focus: maintenance, security, releases, documentation and independence. The project has generated no revenue to date: adoption has grown far faster than the economic capacity required to sustain it, and the maintenance load is concentrated in one person. Every one of the project's 1,298 merged pull requests was reviewed and merged by that one person (counted 27 Aug 2026).