Albert Balcells
CTO at Spruce Technology · Board Member · Mentor at Founder Institute
Engineer & builder since 1999 · Husband & dad of two
New York City · Long Island, NY · originally Barcelona · online since 1999
CTO at Spruce Technology · Board Member · Mentor at Founder Institute
Engineer & builder since 1999 · Husband & dad of two
New York City · Long Island, NY · originally Barcelona · online since 1999
Professional
A seasoned engineer and web developer with a passion for building high-performance teams, elegant code, and thoughtful design. Shipping websites since the late 90s, still hands-on. I believe engineers should be multi-dimensional and genuinely creative. Topics I care about: microservices, APIs, databases, web and mobile apps, UI/UX, marketing, ecommerce, and human performance systems. Full background on LinkedIn →
Portfolio
Websites for big brands
Past builds for major consumer brands. AOL, MasterCard, Nintendo, Jeep, Captain Morgan and more.
Recent
Digital Experiences
Recent websites and mobile apps built by my team at Spruce. World Trade Center, Clio Awards, Jägermeister, public payment portals.
Product
Product Portfolio (PDF)
Apps, sites and marketplaces I have designed and built across two decades of leadership roles.
Side Projects
I run SevenJ.com, where I publish personal coding projects and tools. Two recent ones below: a personalized daily soccer newsletter, and a study hub for high-school students preparing for the New York State Earth & Science Regents exam. Earlier projects include a movie-finder mobile app that hit nearly 50k downloads in its first few months, a helpful email-validation API, a WCAG accessibility scanner, an SMS service that wrangles signups for our local swim club, and more. The pattern is simple. Notice a small annoyance, write a small thing, ship it. Some of them stick. More on SevenJ →
Industry Notes
Field notes from recent industry events on cybersecurity, AI, risk, and resilience.
LinkedIn · Recent
Notes from the 2026 Digital New York Summit
Public and private-sector leaders on cybersecurity, infrastructure resilience, data, and AI in New York, including practical AI use cases in government, API-first thinking, and the 2024 DOJ ADA ruling now extending WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance to all state and local digital properties.
Read on LinkedIn →
LinkedIn · Recent
Takeaways from the Dow Jones Risk Journal Summit
Leaders across finance, law, technology, and policy on navigating an increasingly complex risk landscape. AI is reshaping cybersecurity operations, security thinking is shifting from incident response to systemic risk, and supply-chain risk continues to expand the security perimeter.
Read on LinkedIn →
LinkedIn · 3 months ago
Governor Newsom references build.ca.gov in California’s State of the State
During California’s State of the State address, Governor Newsom referenced build.ca.gov, a digital platform built by the Spruce Technology team, as a way for Californians to see and track the state’s infrastructure investments. Tens of thousands of projects, taking shape across communities small and big.
Read on LinkedIn →
LinkedIn · Reposted
Spruce × NYC DOE: Data as a Platform (DaaP)
Spruce partnered with the NYC Department of Education to deliver a cloud-based Data as a Platform (DaaP) solution, powered by Azure Synapse Analytics, centralizing HR, transportation, and operational data across the country’s largest school district.
Read on LinkedIn →
External Appearances
A few public appearances and conference talks on engineering efficiency, employee engagement, and gamified internal programs.
Press · Gamification.co
Gamifying Employee Fitness at Next Jump
Featured speaker at GSummitX SF 2014 on how Next Jump used gamification to drive sustained engagement in its employee fitness program.
YouTube · 10xSummit
Thomas Fuller & Albert Balcells: How Employee Recognition Programs Fail
Most employee recognition programs fail to drive real engagement. We unpack why, and what works instead.
Vimeo · gsummitX NYC
10xFactor at Next Jump
As SVP of Software Engineering at Next Jump, I talk about the creation process behind an internal public-speaking competition, and how it naturally became gamified.
Writing
My personal blog is self-hosted, running a heavily modified version of an open-source codebase. Below is a preview of the most recent 3 posts. It’s been running continuously since around 2004, over 20 years, with thousands of entries. Not particularly insightful or techie; it’s a log of life events and experiences. I originally published it so my mom could keep tabs on me when I moved to NYC, so it’s fairly PG :).
Personal
Welcome to Albert Rodriguez Balcells’ personal corner of the web. I’ve maintained this site since 1999, mainly for family and friends. I try to update it with pictures and my personal blog. I’m a geek, a husband, and a grateful dad of two wonderful daughters, Laia and Sofia. Nicole is my better half, and we’ve been together for 17 years now. I like to tinker and never stop learning. Endless curiosity about so many things. I find joy in small things: a walk by the water, taking apart hardware, watching a TV show, swimming, a boat ride. I live in Long Island, NY, fortunate to be by the water; lived in NYC for nearly two decades pre-COVID; grew up in Barcelona, Spain. Read more about me →
Life in pictures
And here are my latest Insta posts! I don’t post often, but I do enjoy capturing nice moments and sharing them once in a while.
I’ve taken tens of thousands of pictures over the years and arranged them into photo albums: trips, family gatherings, conferences, and of course my kids. I stopped a while back when things got hectic, but by then I had over 300 albums and 10,000+ pictures. More recently I wrote a JavaScript widget to pull 3 random photo albums each time to feature them here. All my photo albums →
From the archives
Many years ago, I built several websites based on Spanish TV soap operas. The story: my mom was watching them in Spain, but Univision was ahead in the US, so I would record them, watch them, and summarize what was coming next for her. Started with one and grew into a few. Traffic eventually hit thousands of daily users. It’s died down over the years, of course, though there’s still a non-trivial tail of traffic that follows whichever country is airing them.
