about

how i got from a sql course at sixteen to writing software full time

2017

my first contact with software happened when i decided to become minimally useful. i was sixteen. i googled for courses, found one on sql server, talked to my parents and got enrolled.

it was a small course about sql, and my class was full of employees from real companies. me and my cousin (who i had talked into joining), were the only two who did not know what sql was even for.

i learned everything there was to learn and finished top of the class. but nobody could explain to me what a query was for in real life. i could not grasp that a computer would run that thing on its own. i had never seen programming.

the sql server course, 2017

right after that i took a course on php, html and css. that is when i understood where sql fit. but i was missing something essential: repertoire. i had no idea where any of it could be applied.

*php, html and css course, 2017 *

phones

during that course i got the chance to learn how to repair phones, and since it was tangible in a way software was not, i did not think twice. fix the phone, get paid. i dropped software and went to hardware.

which is me dressing it up. i worked at a market stall in ridiculous conditions. but everything teaches you something.

the stall (thanks mr. Paulo for the opportunity)

that shop could not even cover my bus fare, so when my student pass ran out i had to leave. i learned the trade, settled into another shop, saved some money, and in 2018 moved into an apartment with a friend.

it was a big change. in my whole social circle i was the only one who managed to have a job and a place right after turning eighteen.

which is me dressing it up again. our apartment did not have a single piece of furniture. and everything teaches you something.

the apartment, before the furniture

2019

a few months later, once we had bought some furniture and my place had become where everyone met, a cousin showed up on a random sunday night with a ticket to new york for april 4th, 2019. the plan was to land there, go to boston, and spend six months working at whatever showed up.

i bought a ticket the same night, without thinking. on april 4th i left for the absolute unknown with no goal beyond learning something, in whatever form.

back bay, boston, may 26th 2019

that part of my life was hard. eighteen years old, no english, and exposed to every kind of trouble youth can find. i held on for six months that felt like six years. i worked two jobs faithfully and paid every bill. i came home with less money than i had left with.

the funny part is that when i got back to brazil, everything that had been difficult before the trip had become easy.

i took a few months to land back into brazil and let go of the anxiety i had been carrying in the states. a lot of waterfalls and birthday parties cured me in a way that went further than i expected. i stopped grinding my teeth at night, and every year since i have grown calmer.

the shop

recovered, i opened a phone shop at a market in the town where i grew up, and it went well. i do not remember exactly how long it stayed in that spot, but it was an interesting stretch of my life.

the shop

then i had the brilliant idea of moving it to a better neighbourhood, and we did a serious renovation at the new address. after the move i never took a single dollar back out of that company (basically broke). my head was already somewhere else.

the new address

i could not explain it at the time, but i wanted to educate myself. boston had raised questions that the phones and the shop were never going to answer. i wanted to belong to that city. to sit comfortably on a bench with a book, run in the park early, walk down newbury street to buy something instead of to work.

with the shop going from bad to worse, life handed me exactly what i wanted. i went back to boston to rebuild.

cambridge

2022

walking to lunch at a brazilian restaurant in everett one day, i made one of the most resolute decisions of my life: i would dedicate myself to software. it was a strange thing. from that day on it is all i have done.

that same year i started single, a system for organizing phone repair shops, and landed a developer job at a company based in dubai. what are the odds!

back bay again, 2023

my system sold like water in a desert, and every day it demanded more code, more marketing, more management. at the company i kept taking on more: i introduced vue.js as the standard, rewrote the entire framework we used for new projects, ran research on web3, and started taking part in business decisions more and more. i sold the shop in brazil and actually became an engineer.

and that is how it went. when i took my eyes off the code, my financial crisis had passed, i had become an engineer, and i no longer had a shop. i felt better than i ever had.

the company opened a base in são paulo, brazil and i moved there right away.

vila mariana, são paulo, 2024

the road

after that on-site project i went back to brasília, and with a lot more freedom i enrolled in a software engineering degree to educate myself formally. i kept working remotely and running single, which by then had a structure less dependent on me and on code.

with that freedom i went to see the world with the unworried eyes i had wanted back when i arrived in boston as a teen. i started going to every kind of show, museum and fair. i travelled many times without a specific destination. being able to manage anywhere, plus having the money to do it, turned me into an observer of the world without prejudice.

i once spent sixty days driving through minas gerais and bahia, staying in each town for as long as i felt like.

cachoeira dos cristais, parque estadual do biribiri, diamantina mg

cachoeira da sempre-viva, parque estadual do rio preto, são gonçalo do rio preto mg

lençóis, chapada diamantina, bahia

serra do cipó, mg (i almost died that day)

2026

with all of that behind me, i decided to move to the countryside, still in brasília. today i live forty minutes by car from the city and fifteen kilometres from the nearest paved road.

it is a small farm with papaya, avocado, guava, jabuticaba, mango, lemon, orange, tangerine, jackfruit, sugarcane and lychee. there is a garden with chives, parsley, basil, red chilli, lemongrass, lemon balm and boldo. and my two dogs, thor and chihiro.

chihiro, eighty days old

i do not know what beetle this is, but it lives on my pepper plant

thor. yes, he is enormous

home

here i have given myself to knowledge more than ever, in my field and also in literature, music and, of course, the land.

this about is a bit of my professional path, touching my personal one along the way. at a time when everything is made by AI, i am convinced that what is made by hand will stand out more than ever. so if you are reading this, it is a pleasure to share some of what i have done and how i live these days.

september 1st, 2026.