I'm writing this from Piracicaba, a small city in the interior of São Paulo, Brazil. About as far from Silicon Valley as you can get, which is exactly why I like it here.
I've been working in tech for 18 years. I came into it the long way around, starting out building websites at marketing agencies, eventually running my own, and along the way I got obsessed with design and UI/UX, which I studied as seriously as I studied code. As an agency, I helped a dying company find new life by pivoting their entire business. I also helped run a regional developer conference for three years, and started my own SaaS on the side, which today serves more than 80,000 users.
At Forecastr, I wrote our calculation engine from scratch, back before AI was a thing you could just ask for help. It's faster and more flexible than Excel, and it's still the heart of everything we build on top. The team has also given me firsts I never expected, like seeing snow for the first time during an offsite in Colorado.
I'm honestly passionate about what I do, which sounds like a cliché until you've spent enough years doing the opposite to know the difference. I'm the kind of person who could happily live in front of a computer. The only thing that pulls me out of the chair is traveling with my wife Nathália and our two kids, Cecília and Benício.