Growing up I have always been facinated by technology in general. I was always fiddling with some equipment, reading instruction manuals and fixing random stuff at my house.
To give you an idea of how crazy it all went, after a trip to the US, my father brought home a new Casio pocket electronic diary, one of the fancy ones with 64 KB of RAM! The instructions manual was all written in English and my father had thrown the digital organizer into a drawer as it was too much of a hassle to set it up. This was the 90s and I was about 6 years-old, meaning I had just started reading and writting, but I couldn’t let this great piece of technology go to waste in my father’s bedside drawer.
Even never having learned English before (and barely knowing how to read and write in Portuguese for that matter), I got both the equipment and its manual, sat down and 12 hours later had my father’s entire contact list transfered to it. I just loved that this little thing could do so much! And my passion for new tech and everything related never went away.
I’ve since often been an early adopter of lots of stuff, as much as living in Brazil has allowed me to be, and have been an avid reader of tech blogs and recently subscriber to so many tech Youtube channels. As I mentioned in my first post here, starting this site has always been a desire, one that I now put to action. I hope that it will become a great side-project for me and a relief-valve to whenever I need to stop a bit and just put my thoughts into writing.
Professional Path
As I mentioned before, I’m originally from Brazil, born and raised in Rio de Janeiro just blocks away from the famous Ipanema Beach. I did my undergrad in Mechanical Engineering at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro with a double degree at the École Centrale de Nantes, in France. After graduation I worked in Denmark for around 8 months before going back to Brazil for the next 8 years.
In 2019 I decided to pursue a graduate degree and applied to the Leaders for Global Operations program at MIT. LGO is an MSc/MBA dual-degree program that is condensed in the same 2-year period of the regular MIT Sloan full-time MBA course. It allowed me to follow exactly what I wanted: to get a business degree with knowledge I lacked for the corporate world while maintaining my engineering roots.
LGO is perfect for the operations focused engineer with management and coordination aspirations. I’m currently in the middle of my first year and very excited with the program! I have just finished the program, and it was amazing. I’m writing a post about my graduation and next steps that will be up soon.
Photography and Videography
I started my photographic hobby in 2006 when I bought my dear Sony Cyber-shot DSC-R1. This camera had an incredible lens with an amazing zoom range and great sensor, resulting in an insane image quality for a prosumer camera at the time, receiving a Highly Recommended review at DPReview.
When I moved to France in 2008 I upgraged to a Canon Rebel 400D, my first DSLR which allowed me to switch lenses and thus invest in better glass. In 2011, back to Brazil, I upgraded once again to the Canon T3i, while keeping all me previous Canon lenses.
After reading lots of reviews and watching hundreds of videos, in 2017 I decided to move away from Canon and embrace the Sony life. I got a A6500 and on top of photography started making short videos, specially for my travels.
When I got to the US in the end of 2020 I though I was finally ready to invest in a full-frame setup. The A7C was the perfect camera, keeping the small form factor of my previous setup and boosting my photo and video quality.
Computer and Tech
I’ve always been interested in computers and tech. I assembled and configured many of my computers, got into Macs and back and have been using lots of tech stuff.
I have a DJI Mavic Pro drone which I use whenever I want to get some cool aero shots for travel videos, a full NAS solution to store my photos and documents, a Kobo e-reader (should I switch to a Kindle?), gimbal stabilizer, espresso machine, Wacom tablet and the list goes on.
I guess the short version is that I usually go all-in whenever I find a new cool hobby. My passion for all of it is what inspired me to start the site and I hope I’ll be able to share it all here.
Coding
I’m not really a developer, rather I’m just a big enthusiast. I like writing small scripts that help me automate repetitive stuff and some spreadsheets or python apps that fulfill an specific purpose around my work or hobbies.
Again, starting this site is another coding side-project that I hope will stick around for some time.