Story
In the order it happened
From a childhood in the countryside to the work I do now. Where a chapter turned into a project, the link takes you to it.
Childhood
My father’s computer
Before we had a computer, I opened every electronic thing in the house to see what was inside, and a fair share of it never worked again.
The first computer came from my father’s job. It was a huge grey box running Windows XP, with a tube monitor, a ball mouse and a fan that only stopped screaming after a slap on the side of the case. It lived in his office, a room children did not go into. I asked so many times that he gave in. In his mind, computers would matter for getting a job one day, and he was right.
First came Pinball and Minesweeper, until I was sick of them. Then came dial-up: open the connection, type the provider’s password by hand, wait for the noise to stop. That is how I found the forums, and found out that on the other side there were people writing tutorials for free, for people who knew nothing. People like me.
The computer aged and froze, and I learned to format it from those tutorials. I formatted mine so many times I lost count, and one day a neighbor asked me to look at his. Then another one did. I installed programs and burned PS2 games for pocket money, the first money a computer ever made me.
Fixing computers paid, but what kept me at the screen was games. I played Tibia until the connection dropped and went to the LAN house with my friends, and at some point playing stopped being enough. I wanted to make one.
Up to age twelve
Games made in PowerPoint
I started with the tool I had: PowerPoint. Each slide was a screen, each button jumped to another slide, and that was enough for a menu, a level and an ending. It sounds like a joke, but I was not the only one. There were whole communities of people making games out of slides, trading files and tricks.
The trouble with PowerPoint is that nothing moves. A character jumps from one slide to the next, and I wanted mine to walk. Looking for a way, I found out there were programs made just for building games. From the videos of a channel called Drak Tutoriais I learned RPG Maker XP and made a few small games with a story and a handful of levels, which I sent to my friends.
Then came Construct. There you build a game out of events, when this happens do that, and that is where I first met logical reasoning, long before I knew it had a name. Almost everything I made in those years is gone. I did not know what a backup was.
I still needed scenery and characters, so I went to learn Blender. At twelve I decided I knew enough to teach it and started a tutorial channel on YouTube. I did not. The child’s voice did not help either, and the comments were merciless. It is still one of the most embarrassing moments of my life, and the video is still up.
Teenage years
A cube at ten frames a second
Then Minecraft arrived and the whole town wanted to play it. I squeezed that PC until the game opened, and somewhere along the way a word I did not know showed up on the screen: Java. I looked it up and found out that every engine is built on a programming language.
So I did the least sensible thing that computer allowed and installed Unity. It installed. I put a cube on a flat plane and wrote a few scripts to move it left and right with the arrow keys. It ran at about ten frames a second, with every other window closed. That was my first real line of code, in C#.
A few months later the PC died for good. We were a family of modest means, and my parents worked hard enough that nothing we needed was ever missing, but a new computer did not fit the budget. For the next few years I used a neighbor’s, a cousin’s, the LAN house’s.
In those years I skated, with Charlie Brown Jr. in my ears, the soundtrack of every Brazilian kid on a skateboard back then, and at home it was Limp Bizkit, Korn and Sepultura. In the countryside, though, the economy turns on agriculture, and when it was time for high school, that is where life pointed.
2018 to 2020Clevelândia, PR
Ubuntu from a borrowed flash drive
I did high school together with a technical course in agriculture, at an agricultural boarding school. It made sense: the jobs in the region were in the fields, and nobody there had a reason to push me towards a keyboard. I kept at computers anyway, out of stubbornness.
I took a used laptop that had cost 200 reais to the dormitory, and it froze just opening Word. One day, watching me fight with it, a friend from the dorm asked why I did not use Linux. I borrowed a flash drive, wiped the laptop right there and installed Ubuntu. A machine that looked finished worked again.
I learned the command line the usual way back then: searching “how to install this program on Ubuntu” and copying the command from the first blog that came up. I never left Linux after that. It has been my main system, it has shared a disk with Windows in dual boot, and today it runs in WSL, where I write code.
CEEP Assis BrasilAgricultural technician, with high school
2021 to 2023Vilhena, RO
1,470 hectares in Rondônia
Diploma in hand, I went to work on a farm in Vilhena, in Rondônia. I was in charge of pesticide application on 1,470 hectares, with a crew of two and a GPS tablet to keep every pass of the machine on its line.
The old laptop came along in my backpack. But it was the first real paycheck that changed things: I bought a decent computer and went back to C# and Unity, no longer counting frames. This time I went past games. I started building sites and programming for its own sake, and it began to look like a job I could have.
I was doing well on the farm, but it did not fulfill me. And out there was no university for computing and no tech company where I could learn the trade. At the start of 2023 I left all of it and moved to Curitiba.
Fazenda UniãoAgricultural technician
2023Curitiba, PR
Up at 4:30
I arrived with no job in the field and started as an assistant at an Atacadão, a wholesale supermarket. The month my first paycheck came in, I enrolled in Computer Science at Estácio.
The store was on the other side of the city, two hours away each way. Supermarkets open early, so I was up at 4:30, and the degree was in person, in the evening, so I got home close to midnight. I slept little and thought that was normal.
The degree opened the first door. With it on my CV I got an IT support job at Condor, a large supermarket chain: hardware, software, point of sale setup, monitoring the stores’ automation. It was the first time I saw a system in production up close, and people who depended on it to do their jobs.
Condor Super CenterIT support
2023 to 2024Curitiba, PR
Between the clients and the developers
Three months after I started at Condor, a referral took me to Zhavia, a startup that builds management software. It was my first time inside a technology company. I started in back office, the support that takes what customer service cannot solve, and for that I had to know the business rules of a huge system by heart.
The developers wanted to bring me onto the team, and in my last months there I did requirements analysis only. I became the bridge between them and the clients: I met clients to find out what they needed, talked it through with the developers, and wrote the documentation in Confluence, attached to the Jira issue. Some of those conversations became features of the system.
The rest of the time I studied HTML, CSS and JavaScript, on whatever weekends were left between calculus and discrete mathematics. It was not much, but it was what I carried through the next door.
Zhavia TecnologiaBack office, then requirements analysis
2024 to 2025São Paulo, remote
When AI reached marketing
In February 2024 a web agency in São Paulo hired me as a developer, working from home. I knew a lot about computers and little about programming, and I learned on the job. Every task brought the next thing to study: when I needed to deploy, I learned to deploy. What kept me going was knowing how to research, which I had been practicing since the forums on my father’s computer. That June I moved from Estácio to FIAP, where I study Information Systems.
Nearly all the work was frontend: sites and interfaces for the agency’s clients, in JavaScript. Then AI began taking ground in digital marketing, and it hit my work directly. Instead of waiting to see how that would turn out, I went to learn automation with it. That is where Python and n8n began for me, first in test projects, then in the agency’s own operation.
I built chatbots in n8n for screening, scheduling and support, which talked to 6 to 15 people a day and answered from the company’s own knowledge, with RAG in Python and LangChain. I maintained a chatbot service in Node.js, connected sites to ERP tools, and automated client onboarding, from the signed contract to the welcome email.
I was already writing code by hand when all this started, and the AI of the time got far less right than it does now. For a long while that is where it stayed for me: automations, bots and repetitive tasks.
ValkeerFullstack developer
seen inOnboarding automation
2025 to todayBrazil, remote
Back to agribusiness
In 2025 an environmental and geospatial consultancy that serves agribusiness hired me to work in C# and .NET, the language of that cube. The company handles land tenure regularization, environmental licensing and satellite imagery analysis, and on the other side of most of its cases there is a rural property, like the farm where I worked.
Its geospatial backend in C# was built by four developers, two of them senior, and I was one of the four: my part was endpoints, the API documentation, observability and getting rid of N+1 queries. On my own, I built the satellite analysis tool the analysts and the legal team use. I also designed and built the company’s site and blog.
Day to day the work is Python and Django, on PostgreSQL and PostGIS. I build and maintain backend modules of a platform the size of an ERP, and it is where I have gone deepest so far. I take part in the architecture decisions beside the senior engineers, and when a delivery needs a screen, I work on the Angular frontend.
At the start of 2026 the company asked the team to bring AI into daily work and to design a safe way of doing it, since we handle sensitive data. That is when, and not before, I started writing code with agents, using Opus. How that flow works is a story for the blog.
Vale Verde AmbientalSoftware engineer
On my ownIn public
Projects of my own
Outside work I keep projects in the open, on GitHub. Hort is a sandbox for coding agents, written in Rust, with its own documentation site. Parlano is a Discord bot that records a call and hands back the meeting notes. Mapsift is a collaborative GIS, still under construction.
And making games came back on its own. I am building a game of mine, in C#, and learning Unity properly, this time as my engine. The cube moves a lot faster than ten frames a second now.
TodayLondrina, PR
Home, in Londrina
Today I live in an apartment in Londrina with my wife. We have been together for four years, and we live very well together.
I cook a lot, and rarely the same thing twice: I like trying what I have never made. Music is still close, too. The teenager who lived on nu metal listens to a bit of everything now, and there is always an instrument within reach.
And there is Lady, my cat, who keeps an eye on all of it from close by.