About the Author
Adrian Mastronardi has spent more than two decades building and running the engineering organizations behind software used by millions of people across five continents. He began at Globant, the Latin American software company, and went on to lead technology at the online classifieds platform OLX as it grew across Brazil, India, and dozens of other emerging markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. From there he moved into financial technology: RappiPay, the fintech arm of the delivery company Rappi, where, as CTO, he helped launch a credit card and digital wallet across several markets and pursue a banking license in Colombia; a fintech venture at Delivery Hero in Berlin, whose technical foundation he built; and Habi, a real-estate technology company operating in Colombia and Mexico, where he has been CTO since 2023. The constant across that work is infrastructure: the platforms, payment rails, and data systems a business runs on, almost all of it standing on open-source foundations he has built on since 1996, when he installed his first Linux system.
That long involvement with infrastructure, Linux, and open source is what drew him to the XZ Utils story, a backdoor planted in exactly the kind of open-source code his work depends on. Half a Second is his third book, after Maestros involuntarios, a reflection on entrepreneurship drawn from two decades alongside some of Latin America’s most successful founders, and Willpower Amplified, on how AI is making temperament a new inequality. Both are freely available on his website. He writes Al sur del Río Grande, a weekly newsletter in Spanish on artificial intelligence, software, and the craft of building it, published on LinkedIn and openly on his website.