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These blog-like communities are a bit funny to me.

People pop in here, all professorial-like, sharing insights and dropping little tips about stuff they've discovered. And that's totally cool. But sometimes it feels like people are doing it because they're supposed to, not necessarily because they're bursting with amazing things they just HAVE to share.

And look, I get it. You gotta show up to get noticed. Part of networking is having a voice and, as we say here in Brazil, being able to "sell your fish" (I’m sure there’s an equivalent expression in English, but honestly, I'm too lazy to look it up). And nothing says "I'm GOOD" more than teaching people some neat new trick to make that div box land EXACTLY where you want it -- because honestly, THOSE DIV BOXES ARE ALIVE AND ACTIVELY TESTING MY PATIENCE AND ONE DAY THEY'LL DRIVE ME CRAZY!

Right, that was a rant. Sorry.

Anyway, I'm pretty green to the whole tech thing. It's funny, cause I've been at it for a while now, as my Github account is almost 4 years old, but it's been a slow and steady process. I'm entirely self-taught, purely a hobbyist, and by hobbyist I really mean it: every single line of code I've ever written was purely and simply for FUN. But yeah, definitely still a newbie.

And the thing about teaching yourself is: when you're teaching something you don't know to people that also don't know the thing, it gets nasty.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is , because of that, I do not have a lot to share. As you could probably guess by looking over my other posts.

But I've finally reached the point where I'm ready to make the leap from hobbyist to PROFESSIONAL coder. I want to turn something I love doing for fun into something that will make me scream, cry, and want to throw things -- but will also pay for my inevitable ulcer treatments.

I want to be a DEV.

And if that means writing stuff down and giving y’all a little piece of my mind to become a more active part of this community, well, then consider me officially on board.

Talking about myself

Since I cannot talk shop, and I cannot share helpful working anecdotes as insights, let me offer the next best thing:

I want to talk about me!

Or rather, let me tell you a little story about how I've always wanted to code but consistently convinced myself I was too dumb to do it. Honestly, I still feel that way most days, but this time around I'm choosing to push through.

We've all heard about impostor syndrome, and yeah, that's probably exactly what's going on here. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you actually know. Eventually, you start staring at increasingly abstract concepts until they make no sense at all, and then you realize it is all made up and nothing is real and now you're missing your Friday night where you could be desperately dancing in a club by just being desperate for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON since THIS (franticly pointing at the computer screen where the absolute mad words read className="px-4 py-2 text-center space-x-2") IS NOT A THING THAT EXISTS IN REAL LIFE!

And yes, honestly, I feel like I'm becoming dumber, not smarter, as I go along. I feel kind of terrible that large language models emerged right in the middle of my learning curve because now I'm convinced that I can't code without ChatGPT.

It's weird though. Whenever I read back code that I wrote with an LLM’s help, I genuinely understand it. I can explain it, spot errors, and when ChatGPT inevitably gets stuck on a loop suggesting the same useless patches again and again, I'm able to step back, reconsider, and ultimately find a solution on my own. Every single time.

But, when I'm staring at the flashing cursor in an empty file in my IDE, I feel dumb and dumber. I have no idea where to start. I feel ashamed that I'm even trying to look for a job in the industry since I don't know how to start a fudging PYTHON CLASS without some lookups.

And if that's a whole project, brother, I don't even know where to start.

But put me in front of that blank file, cursor flashing mockingly in my IDE, and suddenly I don't know anything. I have absolutely no clue where to start. I feel ashamed for even considering a job in the industry when I can't begin writing a simple PYTHON CLASS without checking references.

And if it’s an entire project, brother, I’m completely lost.

You know those kids who buy a Ramones T-shirt, hang around with real punk rock fans, and spend the whole time anxious that sooner or later they'll be exposed as an impostor?

Well, Visual Studio Code is my Ramones shirt.

But it's funny, because I didn’t always feel this way.

Beat on the brat

When I was really young, and I’m not exactly sure how young, but let's say around 9 or 10 maybe, my dad came home from work one day carrying a rectangular box.

Inside was this strange device: a black plastic brick with keys covered in numbers and letters, and a small coaxial cable you'd plug into your TV.

That, my young under-40 friends, was a TK85, a Brazilian clone of the legendary ZX81.

That was a computer.

My 8-year-old brain was utterly mesmerized.

Funny, because when you look at it now, especially compared to the triple-screen PC setup I’m typing these words on, complete with a graphics card that cost more than my last paycheck, it’s genuinely mind-blowing.

That computer didn't even have built-in storage. You had to buy an external MODULE to save your progress onto a CASSETTE TAPE, probably costing as much as the computer itself.

It didn’t have a dedicated screen; you had to plug it into your TV.

No operating system. No pre-installed software. No plug-and-play peripherals.

Just a keyboard and a dream.

Oh, and right, a Sinclair BASIC interpreter and an enormous BASIC book.

Now, I'd absolutely love to tell you how this brave 6-year-old soldiered through the entire BASIC manual, mastered it cover-to-cover, and by age 7 created an application that transformed his home into a high-tech haven straight out of the 24th-and-one-half century. But no. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of that gibberish.

I mean, come on, it was a BASIC book for a 5 year old boy!

(Seriously, I have NO idea how old I actually was back then.)

But those books did have some words in a monospace font that stood out from the rest. And I quickly discovered that typing those particular words into this mysterious device made things happen.

You could perform little calculations. You could display your name on TV. You could draw a tiny square. Heck, you could even draw an entire Christmas tree made of little white squares. All of that just by typing WORDS!

That was uncanny!

And I truly wanted to explore it all. But then, a few months later, my dad came home with another rectangular box containing a Sega Genesis console, three game cartridges, and absolutely no instruction manual required.

So I put the computer aside. At least for a while.

For the Win!

Years later, we got our first PC, our personal computer. It was an Intel 486DX2, running at a blazing-fast 33MHz. It probably had around 4 or 8MB of RAM, and definitely less than 100MB of hard drive space. It had two floppy disk drives: a 5¼-inch drive capable of storing an astonishing 360KB of data, and a 3½-inch one that handled up to 1.44MB.

When you turned it on, THINGS WOULD HAPPEN on the screen. Lines of text scrolled by, informing you about memory allocations and boot procedures, all while a quiet ticking echoed steadily from inside the computer. And when all was finally said and done, you'd once again be greeted by a black screen and a blinking prompt awaiting your commands.

But this prompt was different. It stood beside some curious characters, specifically: C:\>.

And you couldn’t just type anything you wanted, because it would rudely inform you that it didn’t understand your so-called "command."

Oh, and this time around, there was no instructional manual, and, obviously, no internet. So figuring things out became a bit trickier.

Around that period, classes promising to teach you "how to use a computer" began popping up everywhere. And trust me, if using computers seems intuitive nowadays, back then it certainly wasn't. Naturally, I enrolled in one of those.

Those were fun times. You'd leave your computer class carrying a floppy disk with a fresh new copy (pirated, of course, but come on!) of Prince of Persia, Indy 500, or Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? And right about now, if you're around your 40s, you're definitely humming that catchy little tune in your head, wondering which country the suspect who changed all their money into marks was heading to next.

You learned how to navigate directories, create, delete, and search for files using nothing but the keyboard. You’d constantly interact with console-based programs, playing entire video games within these text-based environments.

That was MS-DOS, the grandpa of PowerShell, the grumpy old-timer who sparred endlessly with another grumpy old guy called Unix Bash.

Exploring these uncharted territories was amazing. Every day brought a new command to master; some of those I still use today when fiddling with terminals during development.

But then, one day, we learned a different new command:

win.

Typing those three little letters and pressing enter transported you to another dimension, as it was the Feywild of computing: Windows 3.11, a GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE where you could actually control the computer with a MOUSE.

You could CLICK things. You could RIGHT-CLICK things. And they were DIFFERENT actions!

You could DRAG AND DROP things.

You could OPEN a window. And then you could CLOSE that same window.

You could draw masterpieces in PAINTBRUSH. You could play SOLITAIRE. You could play MINESWEEPER. Or not, because let's face it, that game made no sense at all.

But there it was—something both utterly weird and spectacular. Seriously, it hit me so hard that years later it directly inspired the layout of my own website today.

(I realize my site has more of a Windows 95 vibe than a 3.11, but the feeling is exactly the same.)

Having that kind of control over things was incredible. I felt like Dean Pelton when he discovered VR: I COULD DO THINGS THAT MADE JESUS WEEP, FOR THERE WERE NO MORE WORLDS TO CONQUER!

(If you didn’t get that very specific reference, I completely understand.)

The point is, you could create amazing things on that computer, and that deeply resonated with me.

I wanted to learn more.

Kick ass and chew bubble gum

I really enjoyed fiddling around with that old computer. So much so that eventually, we upgraded it to a shiny new Intel Pentium machine, complete with an impressive CD-ROM drive, multimedia capabilities, and a set of stereo speakers.

Around that time, exciting new things began to happen everywhere. Newsstands started selling magazines bundled with CDs brimming with games that you could take home and play right away.

Let me pause for a quick sidebar: these early magazines were really something special. The gaming industry was booming, and there were plenty of new games coming out all the time. But proper channels for selling computer games weren’t widespread yet, and newsstand magazines certainly weren't the ideal distribution method back then.

I come from a small town in the countryside of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where, in the early '90s, nobody would dream of opening a computer game store. Computers were still extremely expensive and uncommon, so it wasn't exactly a brilliant business idea.

Because of this, the magazines we bought typically didn't include complete games. Instead, they had DEMO versions, letting you play for about 15 minutes or just like the first stage before stopping abruptly and politely asking you to go buy the full version.

It's funny because you'd expect us to get annoyed, but honestly, we had a blast playing those brief segments. We'd finish one demo level, eagerly jump into the next, and then onto another, enjoying the small tastes of many different games.

Maybe we were just less demanding back then, because everything was so new and exciting.

To be fair, some magazines also provided SHAREWARE versions. For example, I remember playing Duke Nukem 3D's shareware version, which included the entire first act, an enormous amount of gameplay for free. Big shout-out to the folks at Apogee for making my childhood (and my friends') a whole lot more awesome.

(Death Rally was the first game, that I had as a shareware as well, that I got actually GOOD at. So much so that, when I got the change, I bought the whole thing. Probably the first full game I ever bought).

But I digress. The point is, I'd buy those magazines-with-CDs-packed-with-demos. Most games at that time ran on DOS, so you'd have to exit Windows (these computers booted directly into Windows 95 without stopping at DOS) and manually type a command from the CD-ROM drive.

Typing that command would launch a simple little program, presenting you with menus to pick genres and games, very much like the tiny CLI apps you build at the start of any coding bootcamp. You know the drill: prompt the user, store their input, run some conditional logic, and output what the user asked for.

Back then, I spent a lot of time in front of my computer. Half the time I played (demo) games; the other half, I spent exploring, clicking around, trying to understand how things worked.

I don't exactly remember why I first did it. Maybe I saw someone opening a .bat file in Windows' notorious Notepad and got curious, but I noticed the commands used to launch these CD menus were always in .bat files.

What I clearly remember is the day I opened one of those .bat files in Notepad and suddenly realized I could make sense of what I was seeing.

It was basically the exact text displayed on the screen when the menus popped up, mixed in with strange words like ECHO. But I recognized some of those other words as DOS commands I'd already learned. This was my starting point, a way to begin decoding the mystery.

If you don't know what a .bat file is, think of it as a script-like executable in DOS, similar to a .sh shell script in Bash. It lets you bundle multiple commands together and execute them all at once. You could even write simple scripts with inputs, variables, and conditionals.

Of course, I didn't understand all of that back then. But I did realize those were DOS commands, and it dawned on me that I could create my own interactive menus, launching games, returning to Windows, or anything else I wanted.

(This became even more intriguing when I learned you could call one .bat file from another, and that the first thing the computer executed on boot, before loading Windows, was a file called autoexec.bat.)

Now, I've said before that I'm self-taught. That's mostly true, though I have taken bootcamp courses and used resources like The Odin Project. But here... Boy, this moment right here, I truly learned entirely by myself. Just reading through someone else's code, figuring out what each command did, piece by piece.

It's a feeling I savor to this day. It might even have been my smartest moment.

... as time goes by

But along came elementary school, and then high school. Biology captured my interest, while math faded into the background. Truth is, I had no clue how one would pursue a career in tech. Computers were fun, sure, but programming felt utterly alien, inaccessible, and impossibly distant.

It's funny, because I always claimed to hate math. Yet no other subject could match the warm, fuzzy feeling I experienced whenever I finally sat down, tackled a problem, and actually solved it. That pure sense of accomplishment and victory was simply incredible.

But as far as coding went, I learned next to nothing. Sure, maybe I could write small Excel macros, but beyond that? It seemed unattainable.

I think I concluded that a career in programming wasn't realistic simply because I couldn't find a way to truly create a full-fledged program myself. Those .bat files were amusing, sure, but how could I ever hope to draw some muscular blond dude in a red tank-top and Johnny Bravo shades blasting ugly aliens in the streets using a batch script? It made zero sense.

And then I tried opening an .exe file in Notepad, and that made even less sense.

So no, writing .bat scripts wasn't real programming, and I believed there wasn't any feasible way to pursue programming further. How could I aspire to something that felt entirely foreign, especially since all the software I encountered in Brazil came from abroad?

Life moved on. I made choices, some good, many questionable. I drifted through creative roles, labor-intensive jobs, management positions, then college to study Biological Sciences. Eventually, I became a high school teacher. Later, I tried pursuing a Master's degree.

Then the pandemic hit.

Being somewhat older during the pandemic was particularly tough: it meant that (1) I was part of a risk group, and (2) my parents were older and vulnerable. I moved back home to support them, spending more time with these two lovely people who’d always supported me.

But being back home also meant I suddenly had a lot more free time on my hands.

One day, for some reason, I'd bought a Unity Game Development course fromZenva via the Humble Bundle. It had been sitting there untouched for over a year, maybe even longer.

So, on a whim, I decided to give it a go.

Once again, I was astonished, bedazzled, and otherwise stupefied. Everything came flooding back: the power to create things, to shape ideas into reality. Writing words that seemed meaningless but somehow conjured powerful, magical behaviors. It felt just like wizardry.

The game engine itself was fun, but the real magic happened within that Visual Studio Code file. There I was, typing commands reminiscent of those DOS days, hunting down bizarre bugs by scouring documentation pages that echoed the BASIC book from when I was 4 (seriously, I have no idea how old I actually was). Running a piece of code and seeing the exact output I expected gave me that familiar rush of solving math problems.

It all came rushing back.

I'm not a particularly spiritual guy. I don't really believe in fate, destiny, or even talent.

But sometimes, life tosses things at me that make me question my perspective.

Because, looking back, it all feels kind of connected.

All Play and No Work Makes Jampa A Poor Boy

Ever since then, I've been at it. Constantly. I dove into Python, then HTML/CSS/Javascript -- and nearly died of Flexbox-induced rage. Then Ruby and Rails. Learned what an API was, built an API. Built two APIs. Played around with some more C#, tried Lua and gaming with LöVE2D. Touched React, then Flask, Django, NodeJS, TypeScript, Golang, Wails, Tailwind... and then some more. And then something else. And yet another thing.

I built a landing page. Then a calculator. Then a CLI chess game. A PONG-like game. A Flappy Bird clone. My own website.

But then I'd start a project, hit a wall or lose interest, and dump it. Start another, get bored, dump it. Start yet another, realize it's been done before, dump that too. And so on, and so forth.

The thing about being self-taught is that you're your own motivator, but also your own saboteur. You have to constantly motivate the guy who failed yesterday, and that guy must somehow keep motivating the motivator too.

It's easy to get lost, easy to stretch yourself thin. It’s hard to set clear goals because, when you love doing something just for the sake of doing it, the thing itself becomes its own goal and reward.

I mean, I'd hop onto Codewars and solve challenges just for kicks. These challenges are fun, satisfying, and bring back that fuzzy, warm feeling, but at the end of the day, you're not really creating anything meaningful. It’s like someone shredding a Joe Satriani guitar solo: you're probably the only one really enjoying it.

It’s like a fix, you know what I’m saying?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while it's all fun and games, without accountability or mentorship, I feel like I've gone about as far as I can on my own.

I crave mentorship to show me the ropes: I know what I want to build, but how should I build it? What's the best way, the coolest way, the safest way?

Why are you learning this technology when another would suit you better? Why use pointers when a simple variable does the job? Why build this whole algorithm yourself when there are already 53 libraries doing exactly what you want?

And I need accountability. Something to MAKE ME STICK TO THE PLAN. To know someone out there is counting on me. To have confidence that the thing I'm building has a purpose, an actual user, or even another fellow developer, waiting for it.

I’m genuinely afraid to take that leap of faith again, to jump back into the unknown, into a field that's very specialized, demanding, and filled with incredibly knowledgeable people, especially considering my limited professional experience. I’m worried the real punk kids will ask me what my favorite Ramones song is, and I’ll have no answer. I'm terrified I'll walk into a tech interview and hear "No ChatGPT allowed," and I’ll melt down faster than the T-1000 in Terminator 2.

But I also believe I'm a smart guy. Like, weirdly, specifically, not-sure-how-or-why-but-definitely-smarter-than-average smart. But smart nonetheless.

And I genuinely want to contribute.

Bottom line: I'm here, ready and willing to go beyond level one. Ready to leave the demo behind and dive into the full game. To push myself further and grow. As a coder, as a developer, as a software engineer, as a nerd in general.

So I guess what I'm ultimately saying is: if you're hiring, hit me up at [e-mail]!

(This text absolutely did NOT end the way I expected when I started typing, but I kinda like how it turned out. Also, if you made it this far, cheers! And tell me your favorite ice-cream flavor!)