How I hack my education
I’m so desperate about learning
Did you already get your cup of coffee? Okidoki!
Let me tell you my story! ☺
Learning at school
Way different from my colleagues I just wanted to learn about everything at school: from history & geography to math & physics.
Back to home, I’d take my father’s books to read. Books like The Servant, Freakonomics and The Facebook Effect. “Business books” for a 13 years old little nerd boy.
When I was 15, just saved money to buy my first book (I just don’t like to ask money to my parents): Outliers. An amazing book. Learnt a lot through those books, and set my mindset that I wanted to be a successful business man. I don’t know why. Maybe because of the books. Maybe because everybody wants to be the next Steve Jobs or create the next Facebook. But I don’t know. Business college was so right for me.
Learning at business college
I started FGV business college (FGV stands for Fundação Getúlio Vargas). One of the best business colleges in Brazil.
So excited to learn more about business, meet my new classmates and start my year in the best way possible. But…
It was not the way I expected. Too theoretical. Less practical. I wanted to build products, services, use the knowledge I learnt through the years. So I started to work in the Entrepreneurship FGV Center and a Privaty Equity Firm.
I kept learning business & marketing, but I was not happy, I didn’t feel it was right for me..
How i started programming & college drop off
And I finally started to participate more in the “startup world”. I was chosen to participate in a digital entrepreneurship course called Sthart. Met designers, software engineers and business college students. 100 talented people in the same room.
It was the first time I met developers, and just got curious about what they were doing: turning code into amazing websites. It was so magic. How could “words” in the computer become a great digital product?
I was amazed about this new world. I started to code
“I need to learn this“ was my first thought. So since this M-A-G-I-C-A-L interaction with developers, I started to code.
After college, I was always on my computer at Udacity, Coursera, Edx, Codecademy or whatever website just learning to code.
Programming became a passion for me.
I started with Python, a beautiful programming language. I coded games like rock paper scissors lizard spock, snake game and tic-tac-toe. It was basics, but very good experience to push myself to be practical about my programming journey.
Business college didn’t make sense anymore. It actually never did. I drop off college to have more time to learn programming and do what I was really passionate about.
Since that day, I worked at Sequenza IT Solutions (Consultant Company), Codus Tecnologia (Technical Consultant), Geekie (Edtech Startup) and now Worldpackers (Travel Startup) as a software engineer building great digital products & services.
Hackathons & Programming Competitions
I was chosen together with 100 people to participate in the Ambev Hackathon. It was pretty cool. Many talented people. Great food & drinks 😎 Amazing experience. Proud of my team (we built a food & drink matching product).
Another really cool experience was study and compete in Programming Competitions. I participated in the InterFatecs & ACM ICPC competitive programming. It is an Algorithm & Data Structure competition. Despite the programming part, it also had amazing food and hotel all payed for finalists.
So in both cases I had an amazing experience, improved my programming skills and enjoyed the community 😋
Keep learning & keep pushing to the limit
I just want to keep learning, try new things, build awesome products.
Learning is my oxygen & experiences is my lifestyle
I built my digital bookshelf with HTML + CSS + AngularJS = ♥. Just to share what I’m reading and what I learnt. I love reading books like:
- Biography (Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mastery, …): I really enjoy the construction of a character. But not a “common character”, but people who really exceeds everyone.
- Business books (Zero to one, Outliers, The Facebook Effect, …): As I told you, since as a little boy, I love reading this. It feels good to understand how companies work & control the market.
- Product books (Hooked, Lean Startup, Platform Scale, …): I passionated about building thing that people love and solved a big problem. I define myself as a creator & problem solver.
- Technical books (Clean Code, Design Patterns, Cracking the coding interview, …): Be a software engineer and study deeply about that are part of me and my life. Now I’m reading The Effective Engineer. It talks about how to become a better engineer & problem solver.
My story has just started, and I’m sharing every single day of my journey on Instagram with photos, stories and videos learning programming, AI, machine learning, web development & other fun stuff :)
I’m going to meetups (ruby/rails, javascript/react, ML/AI, product, …) and be part of the community in São Paulo. It’s a cool way to learn more and meet talented people that want to learn the same thing I do.
And finally, I’m looking for a side project around travel or education, my passion. But didn’t decide yet. I’ll tell it in another story, okidoki? 🤓
That’s it!
For more stories about my journey to learn & master programming, you should follow my publication The Renaissance Developer.
That it guys! Have fun, keep learning & always coding!
