About

Chapter 01

Two passions

I came to programming by an unusual path, guided by two passions that, at first sight, have little in common: artistic drawing and mathematics. My taste for math started early: around the age of five, before I even started school, I already wanted to learn how to count, and that interest stayed with me throughout my school years.

Drawing came early too. When I was little, I asked my father to draw the dinosaurs from the posters and from the stickers that came with chocolates and magazines. Soon I started trying my own doodles and tracing illustrations from the books and magazines I liked. Realistic drawings always captivated me, but I also admired the lines of anime, manga and comics; what fascinated me in all of them was the richness of detail. As a teenager, I started drawing only by observation, without tracing. My father liked to see what I produced: he was a great admirer of the fine arts, although he was neither a painter nor a professional draftsman — and neither am I.

Chapter 02

Looking for a path

At the end of my teens, I began to ask myself how these passions could help me professionally. I didn't see myself as a professional artist and, back then, I wasn't interested in architecture or floor plan drawing either. On the other hand, I had grown up watching computers arrive, and video games were among my pastimes.

The answer came through my family. A friend of my brother worked at a large company creating packaging on the computer, and one day my sister mentioned a graphic design course. I thought: “maybe this is the way”. She and my mother went to the school to find out, but that option didn't exist; the employee who helped them suggested Web Design instead.

Chapter 03

Meeting code

There, I studied HTML, Photoshop, CorelDRAW, Flash and Dreamweaver, and it was in Flash that everything clicked: shapes and animations were born from vectors, coordinates and lines of code — drawing and math, at last, in the same place. In that same period, I met CSS and found that combination again in building pages, where colors, measures and positions were defined with almost geometric precision. I was excited about the profession and, when one of the teachers mentioned programming, I left there determined to learn JavaScript too.

That's what I did: soon after, I took a Webmaster course, which added JavaScript and ASP to what I had already learned. I wanted to work in the field, but my attempts piled up without success. Between 2005 and 2006, jobs for people who worked with the web were still rare, especially in my city, and I even wondered whether it wasn't too big a dream. I ended up getting a job at a photography company and, with the salary, I started a Computer Science degree.

Chapter 04

Today

From then on, the path went through college and the job market — the stages are in the timeline below. Today, I work at a company where it isn't enough for the software to work: it has to perform well, be observable and scalable, and rest on a solid architecture. The problems I most like to solve are performance ones — answering HTTP requests in milliseconds, processing millions of them and still delivering the result to the user in seconds. As the demand on the APIs that serve integrators, and indirectly end users, keeps growing, its efficiency has to be measured continuously through statistics; and, to present these analyses, I build reports and visually rich metrics dashboards. In the end, the two passions from my childhood are still present in my work: math, to understand the numbers; drawing, to make them visible.

Math, to understand the numbers; drawing, to make them visible.

Timeline