Late 90s: the beginning
Brazilian TV ad: IBM Aptiva with Pentium 166.
Windows 95 startup sound.
My father bought a Pentium 166 MHz with 32 MB of RAM in mid-1996 to use AutoCAD. He was a mechanical engineer. I know Bill Gates denies saying "640K ought to be enough for anybody", but I remember one of my uncles asking my father: why do you need so much memory? 32 MB is a lot! Somehow, this marvelous piece of machinery ended up in the hands of the 13-year-old me. I can still hear the sound of the Windows 95 booting.
That wasn't my first encounter with computers. Before that, I had uncles who owned computers. If I recall correctly, one had a 286 and the other a 486. Still, I didn't spend much time on computers back then. Most kids were interested in gaming, but as soon as I had access to a computer at home, I became interested in programming instead.
The same uncle that asked why so much memory had an amazing library of books on Turbo Pascal, Clipper Summer '87, and dBase III Plus etc. Encouraged by him, I started learning how to program with dBase. Looking back, I don't know how I was so motivated to learn a tool designed to build business applications. From dBase, I moved to Clipper, and from Clipper to Visual Basic 5.0.
Dial-up modem handshake sound.
When I got my computer, there was no dial-up internet provider in my city, so I didn't have internet access at all. Later, around 1997 or 1998, I gained access to a local BBS and the internet using 36 kbps dial-up modem. That opened up a whole new world. I came into contact with Slackware Linux and Conectiva Linux, learned about Unix, and started playing with Perl.
At that time the biggest internet search engines were AltaVista and Yahoo. And in Brazil Cadê? was the most popular. Those sites were website directories, where site owners submitted the sites to make them available for the user to find them. There was also a quite popular site directory named Aonde? that was created by a teenager. My dream was to create a site like that. And I did. I implemented a site using Perl and flat files database. It worked pretty well for the time. I released the site with my cousin as "Primus Busca de Sites". The business never took off, but I learned a lot.
Window Maker Desktop Environment.
On Linux, I was using Window Maker as my desktop environment. It mimics the look and feel of NeXTSTEP and was created by a Brazilian programmer called Alfredo Kojima. One of the problems I had at that time was that my SiS GPU didn't work well with Linux. Sometimes it worked and sometimes the image was completely messed up. That problem persisted for years until I bought an Athlon K6-2 in 2000.
By the time I joined a technical high-school program in Information Technology in 1999, I was already building PCs, programming, and messing with computer networks. In my first year, one of my teachers invited me to do an internship at the local business association. There, I had the opportunity to work with wide range of technologies. I managed a Microsoft NT network, had a super fast 64kbps dedicated connection to the internet, and developed applications using Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, and ASP 3.0.
2000s: Linux, xHarbour & Web Development
Schmitt Materias para Escritório (2003).
After the internship, in 2001, I founded my first company, Uiltrix Tecnologia da Informação. The company helped organizations migrate from Novell and Microsoft closed-source technologies to Linux-based solutions. At the time, many organizations in Brazil were running legacy MS-DOS based Clipper applications and wanted to migrate to more modern architectures. I implemented Linux servers and network infrastructure, and also provided software development services migrating systems from Clipper to Harbour/xHarbour.
In 2002, I started a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, which I dropped out of in 2003. I was feeling bored with my field of work and wanted to make a bigger impact. I wanted to do "real science". So I dropped everything and went to Oxford (UK) to work as an au pair, improve my English, and maybe find an opportunity to study Physics in Europe. That didn't last long. After three months in Oxford, I decided to return to Brazil and study Physics at USP in São Paulo.
With my first laptop, an Acer Aspire 3000.
While preparing for the entrance exam, I met my future wife on Orkut and that changed everything again. Together, we founded Funcional Tecnologia da Informação, a web agency, in 2005. At that time, marketing agencies didn't yet have dedicated web teams, so they hired web agencies to deliver projects. We worked both directly with clients and as an outsourced partner for larger agencies. We worked with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash/ActionScript, and PHP, and we also began doing outsourcing work for companies in the US and Europe.
When I started Funcional, I bought my first laptop, an Acer Aspire 3000 with a 1.8 GHz AMD Sempron 3000+. It was my daily driver for years, and later it became my wife’s laptop for a long time as well. I remember running Windows XP on it and being able to use Flash, Photoshop, and do general web development without any issues. When it finally became outdated, I sold it on Mercado Livre.
2009 to 2015: AWS, Ruby and latent semantic analysis
Ocapi Lab in my appartment (2011).
In 2009, with an ambitious business plan, some seed investment and two new partners, I took the team from Funcional and founded a new company. Ocapi was born. We developed an ad server with dynamic creatives that read page content and displayed products contextually related to it. The secret sauce was the use of latent semantic analysis over Wikipedia content to calculate weights and establish relationships between web page content and product descriptions. To process the Wikipedia dump I had three local servers, one i5 with 16GB of RAM and two i3 with 12GB of RAM.
Mac Mini late 2011.
At Ocapi, when we established an office, it was my first time using Macs. In Brazil, they were always extremely expensive, and for me it was hard to justify the cost. I remember that even using the same Intel processors, Macs had much better thermals and battery life than Linux and Windows machines. At Ocapi, we started using Macs because they were easier to maintain as the equipment for the engineering team. We used Mac minis extensively. Those Macs were still upgradable, so we could easily upgrade RAM and storage. I remember I also started using the Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard. Later, I figured out how much the Magic Mouse lacked in ergonomics.
Ocapi grew to become Brazil's leading independent dynamic creative optimization company, delivering over 2.5 billion ad impressions per month. We were one of the largest AWS customers in Brazil at that time. I learned a lot about cloud infrastructure and how to scale a large web application with near real-time requirements. We had to preproprocess the wikipedia dump, index thousands of products, calculate the weights for the product descriptions, index the content of the web pages where the ads are being display to identify the related products etc. And on top of that have precise reporting and controls over ad delivery.
2016 to 2025: Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, and AI
My desk setup in 2020.
In 2015, we sold Ocapi, and since then, I've focused on working remotely for companies in the US. I worked for Theorem as a Senior Software Engineer and Solutions Architect, and then with Prodeal first as Solutions Architect and later as Chief Technology Officer which is my current role.
Between 2019 and 2025, I finished two bachelor's degrees, one in Software Engineering and one in Business Administration. A Master's in Creative Industries, where I explored user perceptions of AI-generated content on social media. And started a PhD in Creative Industries, where I am exploring trust, transparency, and ethics in artificial intelligence. In the last years my studies helped me to learn a lot about artificial intelligence.
My current workstation (2025).
Nowadays my daily driver is a Ryzen 9 9950X with 96 GB of RAM and an RTX 5090. I love mechanical keyboards, and while I own more than I should, I always end up coming back to my Filco Majestouch 2. I also have a 16U rack in my home office with my homelab equipment, where I run Proxmox and a bunch of virtual machines. That space is shared with a lot of ARM and RISC-V SBCs and my old computers collection.
2026 and beyond
In this time of fear about the future of software development, with the introduction of LLMs, I feel that we've never had so much power to create. My father was a mechanical engineer, he could design things, but he couldn't easily make them himself. Sounds like a cliché but in information technology, we can dream and make things happen so easily. I know GPU and RAM prices and skyrocketed in 2025, but still we have access to powerful hardware and to vast amount of information, so almost anything is possible.
I don't think I'll ever stop being amazed by these marvelous machines. Some people spend their money on cars, houses, clothes, or social status. I spend mine on computers and books.
