Sixteen years of load-bearing systems.
I started at Amadeus in Nice on a C++ hotel search engine, learning distributed systems the way you do when a core dump is the only evidence you have. I moved to Java and the Finnair website, then to leading a team, then to Berlin in 2018 to work on health data at Thryve, where I have been designing and building the core data engine ever since. It is what Corona-Datenspende, the German government data-donation study, was built on: half a million participants, and a body of published research.
I have been at Thryve since 2018, and now work there part-time: one weekday is mine, along with most evenings. That time goes to studying, to starting consulting work of my own, and to running my own products on hardware I administer myself - which has made me a good deal more careful about the things that only show up at three in the morning.
I am Brazilian and live in Barcelona. Portuguese is my first language, and I work in English and French just as comfortably, and in Spanish day to day. My German is intermediate - fine for a standup, less so for an architecture argument.
Timeline
2018 - now
Senior Backend Engineer - Thryve
Designing and building the core data engine: drawing health data from wearables and devices, then making it consistent enough to analyse. ETL pipelines, data integrity, and analytical data structures, in Java and MySQL. Corona-Datenspende, the German government data-donation study, was built on it and collected from more than 500,000 citizens.
2014 - 2018
Software Engineer - Amadeus, Nice
Full-stack engineer on the Finnair website. By the end of my time there I was the most senior engineer on a team of ten, and covered the team-lead role while the position sat unfilled: architecture, planning and delivery. Java, Spring, Maven.
2010 - 2014
Software Engineer - Amadeus, Nice
Backend engineer on the Hotel Search Engine, searching rates and availability across nearly 800,000 hotels. C++, Oracle and MySQL, distributed systems, core-dump analysis. Started as an intern in 2010.
2006 - 2011
Computer Science - UFPE, Recife
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, including an exchange year at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne in France.
What I care about in a codebase
Boring code that a new colleague can read. Explicit boundaries. Tests that fail for one reason. Migrations that can be rolled forward. Logs you can actually search.
I am suspicious of abstraction added before there is a second case for it, and of any architecture diagram that cannot be traced back to a file in the repository.