Hello World
17 Feb 2018Intro
Hello, this is my first blog post and I would like to run through my background and explain what did I do to get to where I am today, and maybe try to draw a picture of where I think I am today and what to achieve in the future.
Background
I am 29 years old with a BSc degree in Computer Science Engineering. Born and raised in Lisbon, Portugal, I kinda always had a lack of interest in a specific field of study until I finished the degree. I loved playing video games and that consumed alot of my focus and interest regarding other fields.
Only at the end of my course I have actually started getting into CS and enjoying the satisfaction of coming up with a solution to a problem, designing a system, building it and releasing it to the world.
It was about that time during a Summer that I’ve started learning Android programming. I started a small Udacity online course with a pet project called Sunshine, which was a simple Weather App. Learned a bit about Android and I really enjoyed the thought of designing an App that would sit in a device that is so personal to people nowadays, much more than a laptop, and that people use it for a mean of 4 hours per day, according to a comscore report.
At the same time Android development awoken my curiosity for mobile development, I’ve applied to a summer internship at Aptoide, a community driven alternative App Store with a global userbase of 2M DAU, which was based in Portugal and near my university, which came up really handy at the beggining while finishing my BSc degree. Aptoide was huge to me and I never imagined landing the internship and working directly on what I was getting interest into, Android development.
My internship project was developing the concept of a diet Aptoide, with minimal features and, more importantly, minimal storage and bandwith usage. That project was Aptoide Lite. At the end of the summer, there was minimal viable product of Aptoide Lite, and with the interest in watching it go to production, I have joined the Aptoide team in order to make it happen. At the end of the year, the app was launched and it felt really great to see something I’ve been working for months going to production and getting users using it.
Aptoide Lite was my job for nearly one year and, the day I’ve finished my degree, a big achievement for me, I’ve joined the Aptoide vanilla project, the main distribution product to Aptoide user base.
Since then I’ve been working and learning with amazing people with different experience levels that helped me alot developing my CS skills and knowledge in a full feature end-to-end product.
At the same time I’ve joined the vanilla team I have been persuing MSc degree in Computer Science Engineering, which it has not been easy in terms of time management with a full-time job that I was prioritizing more day after day.
I believe today, with 2+ year experience in Android development, I consider myself a Junior with a solid base to be able to aid in decision making, design and build a product that meets the quality and functional requirements.
Goals
My goals are to improve my skills in the best way I can, follow good industry practices by reading and following brilliant minds like Uncle Bob and Martin Fowler, be connected to the dev community and follow the trends of software development.
This blog will serve as a gateway to document my journey and to check my progress. By making it public it will force me to care about what write and to think about what I want to write.