Whoami

$ whoami
nick

It all started back in 2017 when I decided to join the army. No tech business was running in my mind whatsoever. I was actually interested in music production and someday becoming a new Hans Zimmer or Ludwig Göransson. Big fan here 👋

No easy path

I was lost in life, I didn’t know what to do. The army came as a quick solution to my doubts. “Let’s see what this is all about, can I resist the training and sleep deprivation? Will I endure the hell week?”

It taught me a lot. Some things I learned the hard way, some I just knew I had to pick up the pace on, otherwise it would be jail time.

By the age of 19, as 1st Lieutenant, I was the leader of the communications platoon. Those were some good times, I had to grow up fast. But I also missed my family — I was far from home, in another state, and didn’t know anyone.

I spent 5 years of temporary army service chasing music. It didn’t really work and it took me a while to give up. Music shouldn’t have been a job, it should have been a hobby, and I was chasing the wrong career.

The playground

So after a while I decided to focus on programming and did some online courses. By 2023 I moved to the IT Section, and suddenly I had an entire small infrastructure as a playground. Seven Dell PowerEdge servers, two NAS units, Cisco firewalls, and Proxmox running several virtual machines.

I learned a lot from my team and we played a lot with open source projects. Docker and Linuxserver helped a lot deploying simple solutions like Uptime Kuma, Gitea and Nextcloud, and we worked on network security with Wireshark and Security Onion.

Then we started building our own. A helpdesk ticket system integrated with Telegram. An app to control and register entrances and exits of the battalion. And finally we rebuilt the Joomla intranet using Angular, Nginx, Strapi and Node.js.

That is the part that stuck. I built those systems and then I was the one who had to keep them running, which is a feedback loop most engineers never get.

What I do now

Full stack software engineer in São Paulo. Three-plus years of web applications, mobile apps and all sorts of backends — TypeScript, Python, Bash, C# and Flutter are some of the languages I’ve used. Applications I’ve built serve more than 10,000 daily active users.

It splits two ways today. Full-time I’m on data: healthcare analytics pipelines on BigQuery, Dataform and Python, and the dashboards clinical and business teams make decisions on. Alongside that there are a couple of startups I’m working with.

Portuguese is my first language, English my second. I studied Systems Analysis and Development at Descomplica.

So — whoami? That’s the long answer. The short one is still nick, and I’m open to new opportunities. Email is the fastest way to reach me, or take the résumé if you want all of this compressed into one page.