I was 12. The computer was patched together, the wall behind me was unpainted block, and when it rained we put a bucket next to the desk. From that room I built one of the most visited websites in Brazil.
Blogspot banned it, so I learned PHP, MySQL, and SEO because there was no other way to keep it alive. That site paid for college. It also decided what I would do for the rest of my life.
At 16 I was writing software for Brazilian companies. A few years later I decided I wanted to be paid in dollars, which sounded arrogant at the time and mostly meant sitting through a hundred interviews until someone said yes. Then Europe, then the UK, then 31 countries with a laptop and a deadline.
At 27 an offer came from Abu Dhabi. Everyone told me it was crazy. Stable career, wife, friends, family, a life that worked. I went anyway. The first three months I felt like the worst person in the room: different accents, different cultures, nothing implicit, no shared shortcuts. Competence was the entry ticket, not the advantage. Communication was the job.
That is where I learned the thing that actually changed my career, and it was not Kubernetes or a database or the cloud. It was storytelling. Being able to explain what I had built, and why it mattered, to someone who did not share my context. It got me the invitation. It later helped raise money for a startup I cofounded.
So I started writing in public. No ads, no bought reach, no pods. Just showing up every week with something true. 33,449 people later, the doors that opened were not the ones on my CV.
Today I am Founder and CTO. I still write every week, I record Coffee with the Dev with a coffee and no script, I mentor engineers who want the job, I give talks, and I write for a few people whose work deserves an audience they have no time to build.