Intro
Hi! I am Andre and currently this is what I do:
Work as a software engineer at Miro (www.miro.com)
Read books and write what I learn in this website
Watch movies and occasionally write about them in this website
Playing a bit of iRacing and trying to get better there
Career
Professionally, I started in 2014 working as an environmental engineer after I graduated from the "Universidade de Fortaleza", a university in the state of Fortaleza, Brazil. Working with the enviroment was interesting to me but too much bureaucracy left me longing for something more concrete, some occupation that would give me more concrete results. I wanted to see the results of what I worked on. That's why I quit environmental engineering and after trying other things, eventually found software engineering as the chosen occupation.
Working with software is pretty amazing because the feedback loop is tremendously quick. I do something and I see it running on a computer. The iteration process is very fast and it gives me lots of learnings when I make mistakes and lots of satisfaction when I do things right. I feel fortunate to have been working in such a great area of expertise.
Currently, I do mainly frontend development, which is basically building websites and applications that run in a browser. But my interests go beyond that as I enjoy learning about the server as well as the automation to make development faster, safer and more scalable.
Nowadays I work for Miro, which has a great tool that's also called Miro. Go check it out at www.miro.com.
Reading
I was never a power reader and I still think I am not. I enjoy taking my time and reading to learn something that will benefit me and others. By the way, that's the whole goal of this website, where I can write the most important learnings I got from a book a read.
One of the principles I take very seriously is the Pareto rule. And I try to use it in this blog, so my posts are supposed to contain the 20% most important stuff from whatever I read or watch. In addition to that, I believe that we have so much information in a book that I will never be able to memorise everything. Actually, I can memorise if I want to, but it's not worth the effort, so I try just to get the most important lessons, which are the most important TO ME and maybe it could be very useful for the readers too.
About the books I read, I am biased in reading things that relate to how I think, health, philosophy and spirituality. I don't enjoy reading technical books too much and I only read those if it's required for work. But because I recognise this bias, I try to get outside of the box and read novels, autobiographies and maybe a history book. And I was surprised on how amazing I can find these books to be, even though generally it's not my cup of tea.
Watching
I am not a movie aficionado, but the truly amazing movies I find are usually the ones that teach me something about life. These movies have an interesting lesson about the world around or even about myself. But these lessons are more like "art", so they are one-way, and what I mean by that is the nature of art, in my opinion, where it's mostly about how I perceive that piece of art. So if I write something about a movie and its lesson, it's what I perceived and not exactly what the movie director meant. But I guess it will be somewhat related at the very least.
Playing
I am not really sure why I play the games I do. I am now very hooked into iRacing, which is a racing simulator. I think it's how hard the game is that gets my attention, but there are plenty of harder games there so I guess I go with these games because I have very good friends that also play them. Playing games all by myself is not that fun so I try to play with friends to make the most out of the experience.
I used to play a lot of Counter Strike and World of Warcraft, before getting into iRacing. And some FIFA but that's more because I am a huge football fan.