About Me

About Me

Hi, I'm Junior, a software developer and system administrator from Brazil. An enthusiast of technology, networks, computer science, Linux administration, cloud computing, and so on.

I started programming with my father when I was 15 years old in Delphi 3, helping him develop software for many clients around the city we lived in. It wasn't much that I did during that time, but it was a task that I loved so much. My computer during that time was my father's computer, a Pentium 166 with 32 MB of RAM, and my own was an ancient 386 DX 40 that slowly ran Windows 95.

Time passed by, and my love for computers remained in my heart. Not only software development but hardware and networks were points that interested me as much. I remember during the video game era that I wanted to know how those machines worked. I had a Sega Saturn during my teenage years, and when I heard that the Saturn had "8 processors," I was dying to know why such CPUs were installed on that system and what each of those CPUs was doing.

But time has passed by. I grew up, started a family with my beloved wife, had a dog named Flock, whom I called "Floquinho" or "little Flock" at the time, and a cat named Poncho. Unfortunately, they are resting in peace now.

In 2018, the happiest day of my life happened. My son was born. He is such a friend to me, more than I ever had before. I'm learning more from him than he is from me. I confess that I had no idea how much happiness having a son would bring.

But life is not only made of happiness. There are sad and tough moments, like October 2020, when my father passed away from cancer, which took his life with much pain and sadness. It was a hard time, the most difficult time of my life. My young son, the pandemic, people I loved so much passing away because of the pandemic, and my father's cancer made it a very complicated time.

The subject becomes heavy and hard to read, I know, so let's move on and talk about my work. Back in the 2000s, I was working at a service desk company until I got my first job as a software developer at a small internet provider for companies in Rio's town, taking care of a VoIP management system written in PHP.

Some time after, I moved from that company and started working at a book publisher called Ciência Moderna. I wrote my own PHP framework (during that time, who didn't want to have their own framework, right?) and developed an e-commerce website that, at the time of writing this article, is still online. I also worked at a research company, and from 2013 until 2021, I worked at a public organization handling finances for the State of Rio de Janeiro. I learned a lot, not only about programming but also about how the public system works. I made very good friends during that time.

In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, I moved to a home office job and worked for many clients tied to the financial market. I am still working a lot and learning new things every day.

Regarding GNU/Linux, I don't remember when I started using it, but it was a long time ago. At the beginning, it wasn't my daily driver but more of a homelab learning environment. In the past, it wasn't as simple as just replacing Windows with Linux. I had my "Mac enthusiast" time, but I have been a regular Linux user as my main operating system on my personal computer since at least 2016, using Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Arch (btw), and Fedora, which is the one I use as my daily driver on my PC until today. A mostly customized version of Fedora. Feel free to experiment if you want to do so. Thanks to the Ublue project.

I'm a very frank person. I don't hide what I think about any subject. I'm politically positioned and discuss subjects that are sensitive to some. We're living in times where many people are judged just by their political choices in a very reductionist way. I try to talk, debate, and present my point of view. I believe in people. I handle those subjects in the most respectful way. It doesn't matter if the person is politically aligned with me or not. Respect and empathy are above all.

I'm also a video game lover. Not so much about the latest generation, but the old ones. I believe that someday, when all PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Network go down, while the 8th console generation may not work anymore, very old consoles like the Master System or Mega Drive will still be working alive and well.

I wrote some interesting projects regarding old video game consoles. The one that I'm proud of is the "Retropie RGB," a group of Python scripts that manage to drive the Raspberry Pi's video output to make the little computer match the specs for those consoles, providing an almost seamless experience running those games.