Hi, I am Marcos, a Developer from Brazil living in the Netherlands, I've been coding for more than 20 years now, believe it or not, it's still my passion.
In all these years I have to confess that I've tried other things like management positions and even starting tech companies a couple of times but unfortunately, both failed. The first due to lack of experience and the second because I decided to prioritize other things in my life at a crucial time for the success of the company, I've learned a lot.
I've also worked as a developer, Software and Solutions Architect, Consultant, technical pre-sales, I am and have been an eventual speaker in conferences and local meetups, delivered many hours as a technical instructor and I've even tried, for a few years, working totally outside the tech world, in sales, but I definitely didn't like it.
At this point in my professional life, nothing brought me more satisfaction than being a Developer and since I've moved to Europe, around 4 years ago, I've embraced Development again with passion and absolutely no regrets. The quality of life in the Netherlands is amazing, when compared with Brazil, where I am originally from, plus being a Developer was quite natural and familiar to me and I wanted a job where I wouldn't have to travel much so I could be closer to my family.
While reflecting about my long career in technology, recently I visited JavaRanch, the place, before Stack Overflow, where we, Java developers, used to go to learn and discuss Java and programming in general. JavaRanch was(is) amazing, especially if you're preparing for tech certifications.
I started studying Java around 1996 and got my profile in JavaRanch around 2000, check my Javaranch profile. I am really amazed that I had almost 1000 posts in those forums. Great times, I've learned so much and since about 2013, like the rest of the World, I have mostly migrated to Stack Overflow, Slack, Gitter, Mattermost, etc.
Looking back, I've been programming for about 23 years now, time flies, I am happy and have a great life with my family, we feel lucky and grateful for what we have and working with IT definitely is one of the things that enabled us to feel and live like this.
But the main reason I am here is to say that I've decided, in my free time and together with two friends, start to create training content. The goal is to have a very pragmatic approach and publish them in one of the online training platforms, most likely Udemy but still open to considerations. I will also try creating more blog posts with technical content and some free videos to share knowledge on Youtube.
During my career I've learned a lot, I've also shared a lot of knowledge and I want to continue doing both for a long time. This is my return to blogging as I've found what looks like to be a constructive environment to learn and share here @ dev.to.
It's in my plans to write about Java Development, SpringBoot, Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch, Docker, Docker compose, Docker Swarm, tests, pipelines, distributed computing and anything else that I might be interested at the time. I will also publish some snippets and useful tips that I can use for my own reference while sharing with others that might also find it useful. I will write about my development environment and about development culture and how to improve team performance.
I've blogged in the past, but never took it too seriously, family and Developer work were and are a priority for me but some of my posts and notes can be found around:
Blogger, some older blog posts in Portuguese
I believe in teams over individuals and I believe in Psychological Safety in the workplace as a way to enable teams to accomplish more than the individual efforts from its members.
Oldest comments (3)
Interesting story Marcos. Good stuff. 👍 It's strange looking back but remembering what it was like looking forward into that big unknown (23yrs ago, in Brazil, devs must have been rare).
Netherlands is stunning.
Lots of old timers around here right now.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groo_the_Wan...
Heheh.. Thank you for the support and the link, yes, I was a big fan of Conan comic books at the time and when Groo stories went out it didn't take long before my friends start calling me by his nickname so I embraced it for fun, spot on, that cartoon is exactly where it came from.
All the best.
yw.
Was a guess but it is a rare word.
ebay.nl/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trks...
If you are Groo, then I am...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeze_B...
🤣