I first got into computers at the age of 8 (In 1998/1999 I think), when my father upgraded his computer from a Windows 95 to a Windows 98. The person who built the PC knew that my dad had children, and decided to install a couple of games before handing it over. One of them being Diablo . Well you can guess how much this little kid’s brain melt when he first booted that copy of Diablo and saw those graphics 🤯. It was love at first sight.

Fast forward to the beginning of high school, I first learned about programming when me and a few friend who used to play Tibia, a fairly popular game at the time, decided to host our on private server of the game. We had to mess with a couple of Lua scripts to create/edit quests, monsters and game events. We had no idea we were programming back then, but it was the purest form of joy.

A couple years later, at the end of high school, I was presented with the life changing question of what career I wanted to pursue. I was never good at math and physics, so even though I enjoyed computers I didn’t think I was smart enough to purse a career in STEM. That lead me to start a bachelor’s degree in law., which was what most people in my school were doing, and what my sister and father also did.

Halfway through my degree I was unsatisfied. I had one the best grades in my class I just couldn't see myself as being a lawyer, public prosecutor, judge or anything like that. One day while talking to a friend (one of those who helped build that Tibia server) I came to the conclusion that law was definitely not what I wanted to work with. I liked computers and games, that was what I was supposed to be doing. So before the semester started, I decided to quit my university and go back to study to be accepted at a computer science course.

Since I was giving up on so much I decided to study hard and aim at the best university I could get into. That commitment let me to be accepted at Universidade de São Paulo (USP), which is regarded as the best university in Brazil. There I studied Computer Science, had to deal with calculus, probabilities, differential equations and all of that stuff. I’m not gonna lie, it was pretty hard for a dude who had been studying law to grasp all of those concepts. But, not only did I prove myself wrong, that I could indeed deal with math and physics, but also that I could also do it at supposedly the hardest university there could be.

I met a lot of great people at the university, had the experience of living far away from home (700 km!) and taking good care of myself. The climb was hard, salty, with a lot of rocks, (still is tbh, see 2020 lol), but it’s being worth every minute of discovery, growth and banging my head against the keyboard when the code doesn't compile.

Well, as far as I can remember and summarize, that's how I got into this life of programming and computer science…