Gabriel Serrano Rojas
Full-stack software engineer
Every day learning new things, developing and keeping the vibes up.
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who am I?
About
I'm Gabriel, a software engineering student at the Universidad de Costa Rica, pursuing a concurrent degree in physics.
Since 2024 I've been the full-stack engineer behind MangaKaCR, a manga bookstore in San José, building their point-of-sale system, e-commerce and integrations end to end. I also work as a research assistant, turning paper-based biomedical studies into offline-first software.
Education
B.S. in Software Engineering
Universidad de Costa Rica · Mar 2023 – Dec 2026 (expected)
B.S. in Physics (concurrent degree)
Universidad de Costa Rica · Mar 2021 – Present
where I've worked
Experience
Full-Stack Engineer
Mar 2024 – Present
MangaKaCR Bookstore · San José, Costa Rica
- Built a clean-architecture POS and inventory system (ASP.NET Core, Blazor, PostgreSQL), reducing costs by 78%
- Implemented invoicing, layaways, cashback, audited voids and sales analytics; fixed POS concurrency races
- Wrote 900+ xUnit and Testcontainers tests; set up CI, CodeQL, SonarQube and Docker builds on GitHub Actions
- Developed the Wix e-commerce site (~3,000 monthly users, ~$2,000 monthly revenue); started a Next.js storefront (in progress)
- Automated a daily product-catalog PDF sync to Google Drive and integrated the tax authority's (Hacienda) API
Student Research Assistant
Feb 2026 – Present
Universidad Estatal a Distancia / Universidad de Costa Rica · San José, Costa Rica
- Digitized biomedical questionnaires into an offline HTML/CSS/JS app that keeps patient data in local CSVs
- Built CSV merge and schema-restore tools and a response viewer to reconcile diverging questionnaires
- Supervised the on-site migration of 600+ paper questionnaires to the digital system used by 10 other research assistants
things I've built
Projects
Dec 2025 – Present
MangaKaCR POS & Inventory Platform
The point-of-sale, inventory and back-office platform that runs MangaKaCR, a manga bookstore in San José. I designed and built every part of it on my own.
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Aug 2026 – Present
LASCE Research Lab Platform
The web platform for UCR's Space Weather Lab. I built its research publications, the in-place CMS and the news management.
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Jun 2026 – Jul 2026
Virtual Microscope Admin Panel
An admin panel for a biology virtual microscope, shipped as a one-click Windows app with its own embedded database.
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Aug 2025 – Dec 2025
ThemePark@UCR
A Web VR portal built by the whole course. I led my team as Scrum Master and built sign-in and the permission system for the entire platform.
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Mar 2025 – Jul 2025
Distributed ASCII-Art Network
C++ servers, clients and intermediary “fork” servers that cooperate over a real switched network to serve ASCII-art drawings.
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my toolbox
Skills
Languages
Frameworks
Cloud & Tools
email me!
