Every app has a strong team behind it that is constantly working to better it. For Argo, we have lots of intelligent, fun, and hard-working people. Let’s chat with one of them today and get to know them better!
Meet Alexis Naveros, our senior programmer for Argo Navigation. He was the first crew member on our ship, and has worked alongside Captain Jeff for over 20 years (at Argo and at another company). He started working on Argo in 2018. It started because Jeff casually asked if he would be interested in experimenting with NOAA data in his spare time. The idea was simple enough at first: understand NOAA’s data, draw a map with depth shading, and maybe explore some pathfinding. Of course, turning massive amounts of boating and depth data into something accurate, useful, and fast is not exactly simple. But for Alexis, that was part of the fun.
From a casual experiment to the real start of Argo
When Alexis first started playing around with what would one day become Argo, he knew something was special. His early work involved figuring out how to take the raw NOAA data and turn it into a map, visuals, depth shading, and the idea of routing.
As Argo started to come to life, the team grew. Alexis’ starter map drawing became the fountain for what was to come: internal visualization and debugging tools. These tools helped the new team understand and test the complex systems that now support Argo’s maps and routing.
Basically, while Alexis may not be designing the literal buttons users tap, his ideas helped power the systems that now make Argo work.
Helping to fix the problems behind the curtain
Alexis spends most of his day working on the geometry algorithms behind Argo. That includes things like polygon clipping, triangulation, depth data processing, and pathfinding. In plain terms (for people like me), he helps Argo take very large and confusing sets of map and water depth data and turn them into something we can use.
One of the hardest things that Alexis points out is how ginormous the data can be. After putting all of the data that Argo uses, Alexis says the raw water depth mesh weighs in at a few BILLION triangles. WOW! That is a huge amount of information to work with and understand.
For Alexis, the challenge is not just making something work. It is making it work better.
“I don’t think any of the problems involved in Argo were difficult by themselves,” Alexis said. “But I’m also a perfectionist.”
This mindset is what makes Argo so great. Instead of settling for a more typical graph-based pathfinding system, Alexis wants Argo’s paths to be smoother, faster, and safer. He does this by using a lock-free, wait-free, and multiread algorithm. Or as he said to me, so I could understand… “It’s pretty fast.”
Creating New Algorithms for Fun
Alexis’ favorite part of his work is taking on tough but unique problems. He told me he enjoys creating new algorithms, truly for the fun of it.
The most recent algorithm he created was for polygon clipping and triangulation, which can help compute in minutes what used to take him days with normal algorithms. For most people (aka me), this sounds HARD. For Alexis, it is what he loves to do.
He says that this type of work is what makes Argo rewarding and enjoyable. Alexis says he loves the intellectual stimulation of creating new and better algorithms.
“I find that aspect of programming so stimulating that I can forget to eat or sleep, just surrounded by sheets of paper filled with notes and drawings,” he said.
This is a good way to show how some of the best improvements to an app are not always the most visible, but happen deep within the foundation.
A Passion for Programming
Alexis started programming when he was only 12 years old, it was on a 486 66MHz computer… and the love never went away.
What made it so fun for him was the feeling of endless possibilities.
“Pure creativity without bounds,” Alexis said. “You can build anything.”
He told me that programming is basically the adult version of playing with Legos, except on a computer, you never run out of pieces. That love for building, experimenting, and creating has never left his side since.
When I asked Alexis if he were not a programmer, he told me he would be something that involved building or understanding tough ideas. Maybe… engineering, particle physics, astrophysics, or a professional LEGO builder.
His final answer? “All of the above.”
A True Geek at Heart
Alexis told me that to put it plainly, he is a typical geek. He is almost always playing around with code, yapping about physics, or playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends.
He told me that he is also a diehard Linux enthusiast. He has been running Gentoo since ‘05, and before that, he used Linux from scratch. He patches his own Linux kernel with changes to the memory to assist his own debugger that he made.
“Everybody writes their own debugger, right?” Alexis joked.
For someone less technical, this sounds intense (I had to look most of this up while writing), but for Alexis, it is truly fun.
His creativity also shows up in Dungeons and Dragons. Alexis is what players call a “Forever DM,” meaning he is almost always the Dungeon Master. He loves creating entire worlds for his players and has been a DM in five different countries and three languages: French, English, and Spanish.
From Canada to Colombia
Alexis is from Montreal, Canada, but today lives in a small town in the mountains of Colombia. His home is now 3,000 meters (9842.52 feet) above sea level.
As he jokes, there is not much boating around there.
His journey to Colombia was not exciting, he says; he ended up there to aid two biochemists with the high-performance computing side of protein folding, just for fun and not as a paid project. This work turned out to be complicated, especially because properly computing the shape of proteins depends on more than physics. But Alexis enjoyed it; it was fun.
He stayed because life in the mountain town felt simple and peaceful.
It may not be the most obvious place for someone building boating technology, but for Alexis, it is perfect.
A Lover of Games
Alexis says if he had endless time to work on something for fun, he would build a real game. With every piece and part created by himself.
It is a childhood dream that goes all the way back to why he started programming in the first place. Creating a game was one of his original motivations to learn code, and it is still something he hopes to do one day.
To me, this answer says everything about Alexis. Whether he is working on Argo, building his own debugger, creating D&D worlds, or dreaming of building his own game… he is always drawn to the same idea. Building something complex, creative, and entirely his own.
A Key Part of Argo
Alexis has been with Argo since the start, helping shape the foundation behind the app’s maps, routing, and internal systems. So much of what he does happens behind the scenes, but is truly such an important piece to making Argo what it is today.
We are lucky to have him as part of Argo’s story, and even luckier that he still finds joy in the hard problems most people would not know where to begin solving.
