Nacho Coll

Background

I’ve been building on AWS since 2007 — from the very early days of S3 and EC2, long before “cloud” was the default answer. As an AWS Enterprise Architect I designed production-scale systems for top-tier customers including LEGO, Nordea, Vueling, and others in the enterprise Fortune-500 tier. That’s where the operational instincts behind everything I do today were formed: cost discipline, multi-region reliability, and taking observability seriously from day one rather than bolting it on later.

Since 2019 I’ve been focused on two things in parallel: infrastructure for blockchain and decentralized-storage products, and the AI side of software delivery — bringing the same enterprise-architecture discipline to both. That’s the foundation Blockchain Web Services (BWS) runs on today: an AI-native solutions factory with a single operating slogan, Demand Becomes Product. We turn validated market demand into production-ready software — engineered by people, accelerated by AI, accountable end-to-end. Every line of code that ships from BWS is owned by a named engineer.

BWS ships several production products from that same discipline. Badges Ninja is one of them; others include:

• OpenAgile.AI — engineering discipline for AI-assisted development.
• Zellbox — CRM for appointment-driven SMBs: customers, bookings, and WhatsApp reminders in one inbox.
• WallaWhats — real-time WhatsApp alerts when your favorite X/Twitter accounts post.
• Blockchain Database — a single API to use the blockchain as a data layer.
• NFT.zK — a straightforward API to mint NFTs without Web3 expertise.
• Telegram XBot — a Telegram bot that tracks X activity and highlights top community contributors.

BWS pivoted to being AI-native in mid-2025. AI wasn’t a feature we added — it’s a company we became. The engineering bar didn’t change: what changed is how much research, scaffolding, and testing AI can now carry, so a small team can ship the same shape of production software that used to take a much larger one.

What we work on day-to-day

My day-to-day spans the whole BWS solutions portfolio — directing roadmaps across the products, reviewing technical design with the team, tightening the AI-assisted delivery workflow that ships all of them, and keeping the engineering discipline consistent from one product to the next. Each product has its own weekly cadence; my job is the connective tissue between them.

For Badges Ninja specifically, we mostly focus on keeping the issuing path simple and the credentials standards-compliant: a visual designer and a REST API that both produce the same verifiable Open Badge v2.0, hosted so recipients and verifiers never have to trust us on our word. Areas the team stays hands-on with:

• Open Badge v2.0 issuance & the visual designer — designing a badge or certificate, defining its criteria, and baking the standards-compliant metadata into every award so it validates anywhere the spec is supported, including LinkedIn.
• The REST API for programmatic issuing — create an issuer, define a badge class, award it: a minimal, code-first surface for teams that issue at volume or wire credentialing into their own product.
• Hosted verification pages & the recipient portal — every award gets a public, shareable verification page, and recipients get a portal to collect, manage, and share the credentials they’ve earned.
• Credential revocation — issuers can revoke an award when it’s no longer valid, and the verification page reflects that status honestly rather than showing a badge as live forever.
• Email & support — we handle every ticket directly. If you email support@badges.ninja, you’ll get a response from a real human — and most days, that human is me.

Articles I’ve written or reviewed

Most posts on this site carry my byline. Some are drafted by an AI assistant (see the editorial process for the full workflow) and reviewed by me before publication; others are written end-to-end by the team. Either way, every code example and price is verified against the live product before publishing.

A few representative posts:

• Credly Alternative — Free Open Badges Platform ($0/mo) — an honest comparison, with prices verified against Credly’s public pages.
• The Cheapest Open Badges Platform in 2026 (With Free Tier Comparison) — a free-tier and pricing breakdown across the market.
• Badgr vs Badges Ninja (2026): Pricing & Features — a head-to-head on features and cost, cited from each product’s docs.