Hello, fellow human. This is Alex. Welcome to my little corner on the internet.
When you see me and I’m not building software, I’m composing music, reading or walking five days on the mountains of Japan. I meditate, prioritize nuance over extremes, and I believe in writing well is an act of empathy.
A life in five acts
From 2003 to 2009, I built websites in Brazil. In the company of one I was salesman, programmer, designer, project manager, and probably one of the first to use Google Ads, finding customers in every corner of the country. It was cool and fun, but unsustainable. The market was immature, I worked 16 hours a day for barely ~$400 a month. I was young and focused on the work, not the money, but at some point I grew tired of it, decided to fire all my customers and start over.
In 2010, I become an employee, and that’s Act Two. I get a remote job in New York and parachute into a fintech project in Africa sponsored by banks. It feels like landing in a combat zone, with bullet coming your way from everywhere. I even had to learn English dialects I had no idea existed. This campaign was baptism of fire, and initiated my career abroad over the next 15 years. I got to meet a lot of smart and cool people, learned to communicate properly and how productive people work.
At some point around 2018 or 19, I decided to move on to management. On the one hand, I was tired of unskilled managers micromanaging the work I was a specialist in. I wanted to become the manager I wish I had and to make people’s lives around me more pleasant. On the other hand, I had a hunch that AI was coming and it was unclear if it’d replace engineers, so it was a bit of a hedge as well. I had a thesis that the delegation of work would be far more efficient if done by technical managers. Fast-forward to 2025, and it doesn’t look like engineers are being replaced (except the unskilled ones).
Act Three comes in 2013, when I sent a proposal to the European Ruby conference (Euruko) as a kind of joke. I had been dreaming of speaking and teaching, but this event was way out of my league. In any case, for reasons that are still unknown to me, my talk was the 2nd most voted by the public and I got to present to a crowd of 700+ people in Athens at the Badminton Theater, built for the Olympics, about the ethos of object-oriented programming.
I learned I didn’t need to be a good speaker, I just needed to show up, and that’s what I did next. I showed up at confs in New York, Argentina, Ukraine, Sao Paulo. An invitation came via email to speak at a Physics conference in Parma (CLConf) for my article on the Physics of Software.
Act Four. 2018. Out of a sudden, I find myself in a hospital bed. Symptoms point to a tumor. Specialist doctors can’t find the cause. My kidneys that are at 10% capacity, and I drink gallons of water to unclog them. Calcium is at crazy levels in my blood. 20 days and all kinds of tests later, we discover the culprit is Vitamin D intoxication. The final drug for merging that calcium into my bones makes me hallucinate hard, but I’m discharged in good health.
Those quiet tears at night taught me what’s really important in life. I honestly didn’t know if I would be alive the next day, so all I cared about was my wife’s wellbeing, my family, and knowing my friends were well. I acquired a level of perspective about value I wish everyone could see, but without the health issues. Those moments taught me to shake off the mundane, and to not stress as much about life.
Act five
This act is undefined, still unwritten. A blank page. It starts sometime around 2023 and I don’t know where it leads. I suspect it has a combination of children, reassing where I live, maturity, getting back to origins, and getting close to 40.
I like to think of it as Year of Reinvention, where I get into new activities to be a junior again, where I embark on new journeys to grow as a human being. Knowing you have about the same amount of time you’ve had alive so far feels like a restart, but it’s actually a continuation. It inspired me to take a five day walk on the mountains of Japan for a reset. It forced me to rethink my approach on side-projects, how AI will shape the world, and where I need to be.