Journey

A keyboard

At seven, there was only a keyboard. No computer around it, no screen lit: just one piece, on its own, and a child's imagination to complete the rest. It was little, and still it was the beginning of a relationship that never came undone.

The first computer arrived two years later, and with it an entire system to explore. Between Windows XP and Windows 7, the boy learned the machine the way one learns a new city: by walking through it. He went through folders, memorized shortcuts, installed programs, tweaked settings, until every corner felt familiar. Some marks of that time survived the years. He still knows by heart the key he used to install Windows XP.

The open case

But software did not exhaust his curiosity. There was what lived inside the box, and he wanted to see it.

He liked taking computers apart and putting them back together. In front of the open case, he recognized the motherboard, the processor, the memory modules, the power supply, the storage drives. He watched the parts, moved the connections, tried to understand what each one did. Research came afterwards and worked as a translator: it gave names and explanations to what his hands had already found.

His cousin was the reference. He was the one who formatted the family computer, and the boy followed along. In time, the relationship gained another chapter: the boy became the one formatting his cousin's computer, and his cousin's parents' computers. The care for machines reached other relatives, and what had been learning slowly became a service.

At twelve, he was already working at a LAN house, formatting and repairing computers. There he learned the maintenance practices of the period, such as cleaning the contacts of a RAM stick with an eraser. He was drawn to setups that promised more performance, like CrossFire, which combined graphics cards, and RAID 0, which spread data across drives. Fixing what was broken was not enough; he wanted to find out how far the machine could go.

At home, curiosity took on another scale. He set up Habbo and Transformice servers from the systems and emulators available. To get them running, he had to configure programs, establish connections and deal with networking tools like Hamachi. Nothing came ready. He learned at the exact moment he made the parts talk to each other.

What you see

In those same games, another restlessness took up space, and grew. He wanted to change how the items, the furniture and the catalogs looked. Visual creation drew him in even more than hardware and settings.

At fourteen, he tried to design his own version of a social network. He made the layouts in Paint, because it was the tool he knew, and used it to organize everything he imagined for the screen. The result mattered less than the gesture: there, the wish to understand how things work met the wish to decide how they look.

Since then, the two questions have walked together. The look of an interface, the position of each element, the path from one screen to the next became a matter of experimentation. For him, they were never separate questions.

The poster

After leaving the LAN house, he made a poster offering computer formatting and maintenance. He won a small group of clients. Some of those relationships lasted more than a decade.

The smallest jobs got the same care as the rest. Investigating the problem, doing it well and delivering beyond the minimum were how he handled every request. Responsibility did not shrink when the task looked small. If anything, the small tasks were where it proved itself.

Later, with another professional routine, he kept serving some of those people. The bond built over the years became part of the very reason to keep the service going. Trust that began with a computer handed over for repair crossed different stages of his life.

The night

When the first interview for a UX/UI position came up, he still had no design portfolio. He did, however, have an experience that served as a starting point: he had worked in sales and knew a sales service system from the inside.

The company hiring served exactly the organization behind that system. He saw the connection and decided to build on it. He stayed up all night studying UX/UI and designing, in Adobe Illustrator, a login screen and a logged-in area.

At the end of the night, he called to reschedule the interview. The owner of the company answered himself. When he finally presented the screens, he brought three things: a problem he knew from using it, a visual proposal and a choice tied directly to the business of whoever might hire him.

He started as a junior designer. The sales experience had helped him see the opportunity; his computing background and willingness to learn shaped what he presented.

Responsibility

Two years later, he went through a selection process for a senior position. He took the required test, passed and joined at that level. The company's assessment unfolded into responsibilities taken on and work delivered.

For him, technical skill was only one part of seniority. Judgment, professional maturity and ownership of decisions completed the picture. He sustained the work he had been hired for, moved on to new challenges and kept the senior level in the positions that followed.

Today

Today, he designs interfaces, defines architecture and builds frontend, backend and infrastructure. The focus on the user experience lives alongside the responsibility of making the system work, and one does not come apart from the other.

From that practice come his own tools and projects. Everyday work needs become the starting point to investigate integrations, native applications, automations and interface analysis models. Conceiving, implementing and examining the result are part of the same movement.

In October 2022, he was already publishing his first experiments with Midjourney. Today, he uses agents as part of his own engineering process, under his specification and review. Security and reverse engineering are also part of his repertoire and personal projects, tied to an interest in understanding the structures and limits of software.

Computing remains present in his work and in the time he chooses to spend investigating, experimenting and building.

The boy with the keyboard never left. He just got more machines to open.