“My passion has always been soccer, how did I end up in software?”
I’m a sales engineer by chance. I finished college with a Math major, and my dad, who worked at IBM, told me they were looking for summer interns. I applied because I had nothing better to do. But I don’t know what else I would be if not an engineer. The truth is I’ve always loved soccer and played in college and many leagues since for over 30 years. But at the level I was playing, I was getting injured all the time. I had to quit. In the end, I grew to like IT. After that summer internship, I stayed at IBM for a few years, then moved to Oracle. And I did very well there. We were starting to work on mobile and moving into the Cloud. Words like PaaS were starting to be used on a regular basis.
But the technology was complex and a lot of plumbing had to be done to get things working. Whenever we needed to do a presentation, the Powerpoints always worked but, as everyone knows, live technical demos can be very challenging. Not so with OutSystems: OutSystems worked the first time and every time. When I first saw the demo, it completely blew my socks off! Everything was so fluid, elegant and simple, yet powerful at the same time. It felt as if every single detail was well thought out, like pure software craftsmanship. I fell in love with it. I’ve now been an OutSystems Sales Engineer for 2 years… And when I retire, if a major TV sports network won’t hire me as a soccer commentator, then I’ll move somewhere near the Rocky Mountains and be a ski instructor!
