André Luís

I’ve known André since my coding days, which feel like a distant memory. We both navigated various stages of the internet’s evolution, earning our stripes and collecting scars.

But, despite his low profile, my contributions pale compared to the remarkable impact of André on the web.

Whenever I meet André, I leave with a mind exploding with a thousand new ideas to explore. Literally.

As a strategist, I have tools and sources to analyze trends and try to understand what could come next. But people like André always bring new insights that challenge my analysis. When everyone else is zigging, I turn to André and other free thinkers to find out where they are zagging.

André is also one of my go-to people when I need to understand the nuances of the extremism we face today. He’s one of the rare individuals I know who possesses a kind of “neutral skin” when discussing these topics, able to see both sides.

Sometimes, it puzzles me how one of the kindest and most generous people I know likes engaging with trolls online. Well, geeks will be geeks; get ready to meet a true one.

Bird’s Eye View

Can you give us a glimpse of your life story?

Most certainly. I see myself as a product of a matriarchal upbringing with strong role models. I am one of two sons (twins) to a primary school teacher and a paint salesman — who, somewhere along the 80s, moonlighted as a pirate radio DJ and video rental manager. My life story is one of neverending curiosity. I had a healthy childhood in Azambuja, a small town 50 minutes north of Lisbon, where I grew up in close contact with many different and frequently opposing realities: Mom’s roman catholicism contrasted with Dad’s side of the family practicing Jeovah’s Witness religion. Mom’s students year after year from poor backgrounds contrasted with middle and upper-class friends. These contrasts would shape me and guide me throughout life.

At school, I split from my twin brother in the 10th grade when I switched schools to Santarém, one hour away by bus, to take a more specific track of computer science until 12th grade. After that, the path would take me to the Faculty of Sciences (University of Lisbon) to pursue my degree in Computer Science. Somewhere along the way, around the third year, I had an identity crisis between self-taught web development and formally taught computer engineering — spoiler: I chose both.

As a professional, my path took me from a part-time job at a web agency (Core Factor) to what I usually describe to my non-Portuguese friends as a local Yahoo!: SAPO/Portugal Telecom. There, I was allowed to grow and explore an ever-shifting web landscape. Hot amidst the browser wars, it was an exciting time with plenty of technologies and techniques to acquire and share through conference talks. That’s when I was given the opportunity to dive head-first into the world of User Experience and conducted a few years of user research, design, education, and technical quality assurance. After a while, I gave up the corporate path and went through the startup world with UniPlaces and Seedrs, not without spending a couple of months in Iceland in between those working for Brian Suda’s web agency while figuring out my next step — all while photographing and traveling the country that would captivate me until this day.

Since 2018, I’ve been at GitLab as a fully remote async worker, and I have never looked back. That has allowed me to grow professionally into a manager seeking to multiply my impact through my teams and explore my non-professional self with unparalleled freedom: from having month-long stays snowboarding the mountains of Tirol in Austria or the Californian Sierras to photographing monumental ice caves on a Monday morning in Iceland and, most importantly, supporting my family when life throws you nasty curveballs. More recently, it has allowed me to figure out my biggest adventure of all: becoming a dad. Being an async remote worker changed how I related to work: I don’t design my day around my work anymore; I design my work around my day.

As someone deeply immersed in technology, how do you decode the complexities of the world around you?

We perceive the world as complex as the lens we use to see it through. It doesn’t mean our observation is accurate or complete, but which lens we use is a choice.

If I choose not to watch or read the news, I choose my lens. In a world of acutely formed bubbles of confirmation biases, those choices might be explicitly made by the individual or implicitly by the platforms the individual uses. Punching through those bubbles and hearing different perspectives requires a very deliberate posture.

That’s how I use technology: to punch through the bubbles while scrutinizing the seemingly agreed-upon view of the world.

In 2010, I attended a talk at a conference in Brighton that would change my perspective of the world and its history. James Bridle was talking at dConstruct under the title The Value of Ruins. Without spoiling the talk, he showed one of his projects: the Iraq War Wikihistoriography. By printing out the changelogs of the Wikipedia page for the Iraq War, he ended up with a 12-volume encyclopedia that encapsulated all the contesting points of view on a factual event. That gave visibility to the biases with which the History books were written worldwide, and I had, until that moment, been consuming without questioning.

Tech, Extremism, and Trolls

How do you perceive the escalating polarization in the digital space? Is it a byproduct of the “real world,” or is it the catalyst?

Great question. I don’t know.

I’ve given much thought to this, and the way I see it, all these polarized views have already existed for years, even millennia. The twist is that before the internet and, in particular, Web 2.0 and the era of user-generated content, when someone spoke an outrageous view, it would stop echoing at the people within earshot. Nowadays, those views echo through the world in blazing-fast reverberation, allowing them to find a host on the other side of the planet where that idea can fester and metastasize into dangerous ideologies.

In a way, the answer is it’s both.

These days, online and offline discussions tend to be a lot about scoring points and not about understanding each other. “I know better than you because the party I support will solve everything with this measure.” Or “you’re wrong because you don’t know what I know”. This is a sad state of affairs. I wish more people took the time to understand we’re all living within our different cosmos of joys and struggles, but at the very least, we should stay out of each others’ happiness. Not every possible position is an opinion; some are just immature or uninformed takes that end up rejecting someone’s existence or happiness, putting them in real danger. Why?

Some people take comfort in perpetuating what was handed down because it worked well for them. Others see the inevitability of society’s evolution. The tension between these two groups drives many needless struggles in societies worldwide.

Bringing us back on topic, I think technology not only has the power to help but also has the duty to inform, defuse, and clarify. Never forget that all platforms have their own biases, though. Moving away from engagement-driven platforms could be an excellent step, and I’m hopeful the decentralized web will help. The growth of platforms like Mastodon amongst mainstream crowds has been encouraging but not enough.

Should we feed the trolls?

Yes, but like the Mogwai in Gremlins, only under certain circumstances.

Feeding a troll to convince them they’re wrong and you’re right is not just a waste of time: it will usually make them dig their heels and become even more convinced of the point you’re trying to defeat.

However, there are situations in which I deem acceptable to feed an online troll.

Remember: passive lurkers of user-generated content platforms always outnumber those actively posting comments.

Hatred spreads. Humans are highly susceptible to suggestions. So if they read an entirely one-sided thread, whatever the topic, it’s very likely more than zero people will walk away from that thread thinking the same thing.

What if there are well-thought-out and balanced counterpoints in that thread? Okay, it is still likely that more than zero people will still believe the hate-filled narrative, but at least you added a deterrent.

That’s how I feed trolls: I will engage in racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and bigoted threads not to convince those who are commenting but to talk to the silent lurkers, the far bigger number of people who are reading those threads.

Make no mistake — all this is by design. Platforms survive by feeding engagement to increase stickiness and ad viewership. Hateful content is great fuel for others to engage, as are typos. Creators sometimes intentionally use typos and misquotes so users engage and comment over and over how wrong they are.

Trolls and overall online misinformers tend to rely on Brandolini’s law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” To fight misinformation and overt fascism, you need well-organized movements to call out and expose those doing the manipulation. That takes a massive amount of time and money, which is hard to come by until society has a wake-up call, which is usually too late.

Another important aspect is “how” you feed the trolls. Always take time to empathize with their perspective. Remember Atticus’s quote in To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until (…) you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” Simply put, you would think exactly how “they” think if you had had the exact same experiences in life.

Spoiler: as you can probably guess from recent news worldwide, feeding trolls in this manner alone doesn’t change the course of society, elections, or countries. It will, however, prevent those closer to you from falling into the pit of misinformation, which I’ve seen happen: friends who were once blindly sharing Islamophobic content have stopped shortly after being called out; either they stopped, or they started filtering me out of their posts. (They didn’t, I checked.)

As technologists, we can do reverse image searches, check EXIFs, cross-reference multiple fact-checker websites, consult news platforms’ political biases, leverage AI tools, and even run local scripts to debunk falsehoods. What I’ve observed is that most people will form an opinion about something without spending more than 10–15 minutes reading about it. If you spend an hour researching the origin of a post, you’ll already be several steps ahead of the mob. Is it not your duty to inform the rest?

How can AI and Blockchain contribute to a better world?

That’s a very thorny question. Both are great examples of technical innovations with incredible potential for improving the world. However, like trickle-down economics, they usually miss one crucial thing: human greed.

AI, precisely the age we’re in of generative AIs, can be employed responsibly and ethically. However, it can just as quickly be used to abuse and manipulate people in massive proportions.

Going back to something I care a lot about, copyright, the old concept of copyright aimed to do one thing: motivate the author to produce more work. With AI pre-trained on billions of items that might not have been appropriately licensed for that use, we risk diminishing the motivation for humans to produce more work. Then… will we have AI models being pre-trained on content created by pre-trained AI models?… Hmmmm. Seems like a race to the bottom.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but the space’s leaders must exercise restraint and responsibility.

It’s the same for blockchain. I’ve seen many projects come into being in underdeveloped countries where blockchain played a massive role in providing access to financial services to the unbanked that were once reserved for the elite. Yet, speculation hitched a ride.

As a technological tool, blockchain can provide a level of trust in a space where trust does not exist. Theoretically, at least.

In a world where authenticity is increasingly more complex to prove, especially in the digital space, blockchain plays a decisive role. It’s too bad it’s usually covered only from a financially speculative angle. Projects need maturing and nurturing to bring their UX up to speed for mass consumption. But they usually fail due to the wavering interest of profit-seeking investors.

The quicker blockchain can detach itself from “profit,” the more valuable it will become.

Likewise, the quicker AI evolves to show responsibility and an almost altruistic service to society, the better.

Learning and Reinvention

What does learning mean for you? And how do you learn?

At the start, I mentioned an identity crisis between two parts of me: the “self-taught” web developer and the formally-taught college student. Both perspectives of learning are crucial to one’s self-actualization. (Sidenote: You’re never really self-taught; you use the tools at your disposal and find the resources other people have put forward. In itself, it is a privilege to begin with.)

Throughout my life, I’ve picked up topics I’d become interested in, and as the nerd that I am, I dove deep into them to learn as much as I could. Not all of them were professionally minded, too.

It could be something like typography or just Pearl Jam’s discography and B-Sides. One time, it was building my blog from scratch in PHP; another, it was nailing a snowboard jump at the snowpark.

Learning, to me, and I suspect all of us, is the act of increasing our knowledge and ability. How that happens is completely random. You can be teaching someone something like CSS, and they ask you a question that carries within it a lesson; once, a student of mine taught me about RebeccaPurple being an official standard color added to the W3 spec by asking me a question in class.

More recently, on TikTok, of all places, I’ve found myself renewing my fascination for learning. Do you know that moment when someone doesn’t know something, but you do? This isn’t a moment to gloat or be a douche about it (like a younger me might’ve been at times, sorry). It’s a moment to marvel at the opportunity of being the knowledge delivery mechanism for that other person. Teachable moments are gifts.

That unlocks another aspect of learning or teaching. Not everyone is at the same level of understanding of a topic, be it CSS, snowboarding, implicit biases, or any of the incredibly important -isms. That means if you want to help someone “level up,” you need to understand their level if you don’t want to lose them along the way. Also, don’t be patronizing, either.

How do you see yourself on the spectrum of generalization/specialization?

Along the way, I specialized in specific topics for a period of time, but after a while, I moved on, and the experience gathered has helped me perform new roles better.

After dabbling several years in User Experience Design and typography, I have greatly benefited from that experience as an individual contributor Frontend engineer. I leveraged the shared knowledge with my fellow designers to close the gap and collaborate on amazing implementations of their vision.

But then I moved on to become an Engineering Manager. All the knowledge I gathered in UX and Frontend has helped me develop technical expertise in the domain my engineers work in and thrive through collaborating with other disciplines.

Taking the time and effort to specialize in something helps you become a better generalizer later on. Shared knowledge is such a secret weapon for collaboration.

How do you cross-pollinate knowledge from one field to the other?

I’m a big fan of puns, memes, and good comedy, so I am constantly looking for opportunities to inject an unobvious reference into any conversation. That thought process has frequently helped me pull in aspects of different fields when I’m working on something because it’ll come to me as a joke or a pun.

It might be a very personal answer, yet at its core, it’s about identifying similar patterns from all your experiences. It can and should also be a conscious act: whenever we deal with a problem or a new situation, we search our past experiences for clues on how to handle it. Forcing yourself to broaden the search beyond the current field is key.

Past and Future

Can you share some of the major lessons you’ve learned in life?

Not my words, but infinite growth is a fool’s errand. I’ve seen many people find nothing but unhappiness by constantly pursuing the invisible rabbit of evergrowing progress. It’s ironic saying this in the context of reinvention and learning, but for you to do those jumps in self-growth, you must be able to cut yourself some slack, too. Take it easy. Smell the flowers. Do whatever makes you happy and not what society expects you to do. Are you into gaming? Game. Are you into knitting? Knit. Whatever your age and gender. Forget about stigmas and stereotypes. Invest in your own mental health by finding appropriate escapes for you.

Another lesson is to get to know yourself. Why are you the way you are? Which anchors are keeping you down, and how can you let them go? Therapy has become far less stigmatized in my generation, but it’s still a hurdle for many people. Maybe because they tried it once, and it didn’t go so well. Invest time in knowing yourself and how you relate to others. It has helped me immensely throughout my life.

Third, and I still struggle with this sometimes. Don’t take yourself so seriously.

Which big questions do you have on your mind currently?

What will be the inflection point for Humanity to change its course and be more compassionate towards one another? The cycle seems to have been disrupted, and the forces that strive to exclude some of us from the party are dominating again.

The other one in my mind is: How much hypocrisy is too much? Just like there are white lies and big lies, hypocrisy doesn’t all come in the same size. We choose to support the environment by switching away from fossil fuels but keep using delivery services that use single-use plastics for our convenience. How do we reconcile those views in the big scheme of things? Do individual actions even matter anymore? It’s easy to find yourself despairing when we contrast these individual choices with the hypocrisy of nation-states and geopolitical actors. One must find optimism in the realization of our role as agents of change. Even performative advocacy, as shallow as it might be for some, has its role in a democracy. Is that level of hypocrisy acceptable if it helps convince leaders their voters are watching?

How do you face the future? Do you make plans for it?

Well, I have a bucket list — places I’d like to visit and food I’d like to eat. I don’t plan too much in advance, though. My only guiding principle is doing things I would like to reflect on as good memories later in my life.

As a father, I’m not necessarily focused on what my daughter will think of me because all parents are doomed to enact some trauma on their kids, one way or another. What will I think of myself as a parent when I’m older? I rarely regret anything because I try to remain aware that I made the best decision I could, given the situation and knowledge I had at the time.

Except for having missed Pearl Jam in Cascais when I was about 14, I regret that.