If it can serve any context, here are some words about how I got to work in software.

I love sound. Most of all, I love how sound “sounds”. Passed long nights of my adolescence messing with music production software, saturating and texturing things to creative places.

This love for sound and music led me study electronics and telecommunications engineering at Universidade de Aveiro in 2014.

In my head, if I could make guitar pedals and studio equipment, how bad could telecommunications be.

Turned out it was not that bad. I really liked the area, but fell in love with programming. My first vivid memory of loving programming was my first year at college. I had started programming a audio synthesizer in an Altera DE2-115 Education Board and things began to click.

Soon after, I began messing with microcontrollers. It was an university custom development board with a PIC32 MCU. I got really frustrated with the fact that everything I wanted to do with it had to be done using command via UART in my terminal. I wanted a user interface. How could I give any of this that I’ve been doing to someone else other than an engineer? It had to be another way.

At the time, the way was programming a GUI in what I knew better, Matlab . I was a big fan of it, but it was hard to distribute. All of us were running pirated versions of Matlab till half of the course, where we finally got access to student licenses. The problem was still the same, there was no way of giving it to anyone other that engineers.

Eventually, in 2016, my second year at college, I starter seeing projects in my department, from our co-located computers and telematics students, which were using the web platform to do incredible things. That got me interest, so I started learning web technologies and build a web application with React for visualizing S-parameters of TouchStone files , to complement my frequent travels to the guided waves laboratory.

My head was now in to programming. Electronics was really interesting, but the area perspectives were not great and programming was so freeing. I could do so much with my computer in my back and things moved really fast.

At the end of college, I decided to go to Turin, in Italy, to study as an exchange student at Politecnico di Torino . There I could focus my studies on things that, otherwise, would be impossible in Aveiro in the electronics and telecommunications master’s optional subjects. I got to study machine learning, automotive software and communications, IoT, distributed systems and cloud applications. Was here that I delve deep in programming projects in general. It was one of the most fulfilling times of my student life.