Hi there! This is the first time that I’m writing a blog post, so I think that it’s fair to tell a little bit about my history and my journey to this point.

My formal education

In my teenage years I was really into video games and spent most of my free time in front of a computer. It seemed natural to study something related to computers, so I started the information systems course at college (it’s very similar to a CS degree in my country) and, oh boy, it really redefined what was using a computer to me hahaha.

After the first trauma I really enjoyed programming. Being able to think and imagine a system in your head and bring it to reality through code is a magical thing to me and is something very unique compared with other fields. But besides my general liking of the field, college was not exactly easy. They teach us what today I see as the “right” way to start, but back in that time it was really hard, things like DSA in C, OOP in Java, operating systems. In summary I was not learning the “hype” technologies I saw on youtube.

Now I understand that this was really good because it gave me a good foundation and the tools to learn anything that I want, but this was not exactly clear at that time.

My first job in tech

When I started at college I needed to get a job to sustain myself and, naturally, I was seeking something related to what I was studying. The problem is that I live in a really small city on the country side of Sao Paulo (Brazil) and I didn’t have too many options to choose at the time, so my first job in the field was not exactly in programming. I got a job at a local company as a “Systems Analyst”, but in reality my role was IT support. I fixed printers, set up new computers, opened calls for the company’s outsourced ERP, things like that, zero space to build software. It was something that paid the bills while I was focused on finishing college.

So after I finally got my degree I found myself in a job that was not what I wanted without knowing any of the “industry-standard” technology. It was a really easy job and without college I got some free time. I could have used the free time at the company to watch youtube videos or play games (as many did) but I decided to learn everything that I needed to help the company build solutions and eventually to land a real programming job.

So I studied what most companies used, learned React to build the front-end, learned Node to build the back-end, learned Linux, Terraform and AWS to deploy my apps. It took a while but with this knowledge I was able to build a reservation app for my department, to replace an old outsourced one, that considerably improved the productivity and cost of the whole process. Probably not with the best practices, but I did it.

After finishing this project, I started applying for remote programming roles, both in Brazil and in the US.

My first programming job

After many applications I finally got an offer to work at my current company Cox Automotive Brasil as a software engineer. It is my first real programming job and it’s the first time that I’m working collaborating with other developers and QA’s, there we use C# on backend and React on frontend and SAFe as an agile methodology. For the first time the memes about daily meetings are making sense to me.

I’ve been working here for 1 year and there’s a lot to learn yet, but I’m loving it so far.

What this blog is about

• I have a lot of ideas for personal projects, mostly stupid ideas, but I want to build them anyway and I hope to share the process with you.
• When I learn something cool I will try to bring tutorials about.
• Also, I’d like to share random thoughts about programming and who knows what else.

That’s it! Thank you for reading!