About me

Born in the north of Portugal in ‘81, I spent my childhood skating, surfing, rock climbing, and mountain biking. During lazy afternoons, I would lay on the hot clay tiles of my attic roof, listening to blues, jazz, rock and electronic music, lost in timelessness.

I was about 8 when a friend of my mother showed me a Zx Spectrum 48K, and I got immediately tangled. Soon I got my own Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128k+2. Wow, such a nice piece of hardware, a black keyboard with a tape recorder on the right side, those contrasting strips saying DATACORDER, it looked like the future had arrived that day! That comes to be my very first contact with a programming language — BASIC, although I had no idea what BASIC was or even the concept of programming. From those days remain blurred memories of countless days, copying entire games from some obscure sheets (most probable rips of the official games), then saving it to the tape, and for the next 10 to 30 minutes saying my prayers, hoping that the game would eventually load.

From a quite small village, I went to study in Oporto, got in Soares dos Reis, a charming old school, where I made more friends than ever, and understood that life was more that sea and mountains. From there I graduated in communication design, and my passion for coding was continuously growing.

During college, together with friends who produced music, I found myself fascinated by the idea of creating visual experiences that synced with the music. Heavily influenced by artists like Casey Reas, Robert Hodgin, Jared Tarbell, Marius Watz and Generative Art in general, I found that code was an amazing tool that enabled me to achieve those hypnotizing images. My mind was thirsty for more.

Coding was the spark that got my first job in a small multimedia studio in my town. I learned Lingo as my very first professional project. With a background in Art and Design, had the chance to work with a multidisciplinary team of architects and designers, exploring print using generative art and modeling 3D abstract scenes using procedural modeling.

Joined forces with Marta (who is now my wife), and we bootstraped our studio, mainly offering corporate websites. This was the start of our life adventure, where we spent 15 years living in Barcelona, where I started working for advertising studios for the years to come. Those were fun years, finding the most eye-catching visuals, and combining leading-edge technology with crazy ideas from creative minds. It was like my VJ times but this time I was paid to have fun.

What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.

Fast-forward a few years, and I received an invitation to join a product company, rakuten.tv (at that time, I knew little about what a “product company” entailed). I became fascinated by the concept of iteration — achieving objectives step by step, building on successes, and fixing failures. Coming from the advertising industry, where projects were often ephemeral, this marked a significant shift.

The product was a Video on Demand service. I joined a team that developed apps for Smart TVs and experienced programming on a different scale, where numerous individuals collaborated closely, building features on a shared codebase. Application performance was crucial, as they needed to run smoothly on slower TVs. However, the code also had to be readable and modular, facilitating easy feature introduction, maintenance, testing, and swift deployment.

These requirements pushed my growth as a software developer. I learned the value of collaboration, both within the team and across departments. Eventually, I was entrusted with building and leading a team from scratch.

From there, I had the opportunity to join a startup. I was hipped about the possibility of being part of a small and enthusiastic group of people coming together with the dream of building a profitable product from scratch. It didn’t disappoint, in 2 years I’ve learned so many different things, much more than coding itself, I saw and took part in how a business is built.

From a startup of 12 people came to a company of 1500+ people, New Relic. I knew their product as a user, enjoyed how magic those agents looked like, how was it possible to collect all that data and how delightful it was as a developer to use their tools. So I couldn’t be happier with such an opportunity. After working in a few different teams building software there was one area that I care about in particular, and that is people management. During my career, I enjoyed understanding what make people work together, I love the idea of teams as multipliers, where the synergy of a group of people can be more than the sum of it’s individuals. But I also know how challenging it is to make it work. I wanted to make part of that change. As a developer, I learned how fulfilling teamwork can be, how collaboration can bring the best out of people, and how difficult it is to build trust and empathy. Those are some of the challenges I wanted to take on.

Where am I now? I’ve moved back to Portugal, back to my origins and I live here with my wife and daughter. We both wanted to see her growing in the place where all started.

I can also be found on Github, Stackoverflow, Twitter, Unsplash and Flickr