Summary

I am originally from Lisbon, Portugal, where I cut my teeth as an engineer and manager, acquiring experience for 15 years across a few industries and companies such as SAPO and Quodis.

I moved to London in 2011, worked 4 years at EF Education First, then as the Head of Frontend at Property Partner, and as Agile Delivery Manager at Nexmo (now Vonage).

I arrived in Barcelona in 2017. Taught Web Development at Ironhack coding school, having had 93 students in little over a year. Since then, I worked briefly for Thoughtworks and 2 years for New Relic and now another two for Preply.

Mission

To experiment, learn, and grow in collaboration, inspiring others to do the same.

Values

Love, Freedom and Imagination.

Courage, Integrity and Loyalty.

Experience

Currently at Preply leading the Design System initiative. Planning, developing, documenting, advocating, guiding, and supporting.

Barcelona, Spain

2019-2021

As a lead developer, at New Relic, developing and maintaining a very large frontend code base, within the world’s biggest observability platform, mentoring other engineers in XP practices, requirements gathering, analysis and technical writing, architecture, design patterns, frontend development, web standards and browser APIs.

As the Technical Product Manager, also managing the technical roadmap and planning iterations, reducing risks and toil and improving performance, instrumentation, observability, and availability.

2018

At Thoughtworks Spain, as Lead Consultant, trying to learn some serious consulting and influencing skills, as well as strengthen my XP and Software Design. Did not disappoint: such a wonderful group of talented individuals, so much knowledge sharing going on, and so much expertise everywhere, it can even become overwhelming and hard to keep up with!

I was lucky to work on a large e-commerce platform with a mature CI/CD culture, and alongside experienced engineers, committed to best practices and quality. Great opportunity to work hands-on - mostly mobbing/pairing - with serverless architecture, infrastructure as code, observability, and other fancy stuff.

2017

At Ironhack as Lead Teacher for the WebDev bootcamp in Barcelona, teaching full-stack web development - concepts, hacks and best practices - and sharing the love for Agile values and practices.

Great times at the Barcelona campus, working with an awesome team of motivated people with a growth mindset and a beautiful passion for continuous improvement. We iterated continuously on the curriculum, practices, and tools, establishing feedback loops everywhere and capturing the process in living documentation.

Another highlight here, the constant collaboration between the UX/UI and WebDev bootcamps. It inspired an atmosphere of possibility, of a world where the "hand-over" is no longer a thing. I guess that along the way, I must have picked up a few things about Design Thinking and Service Design.

Such a privilege to meet so many people, listen to the most incredible life stories, and learn new and unexpected things. Also a privilege to cross paths with all these students - ninety three of them - at such an extraordinary moment of their lives. :-)

London, UK

2017

At Nexmo (now Vonage) as an Agile Delivery Manager, coaching a few teams through their discovery of Agile principles and values. Focused on individuals and interactions first: collaboration, face to face communication, courage, respect and vulnerability, explicit policies, pairing and mobbing.

Then, collaboratively exploring Lean, Kanban, Kaizen and others, experimenting with practices and tools, evolving towards flow, purpose and predictability, reducing waste, defects, inventory and technical debt along the way.

2015-2017

At Property Partner in a complex role with responsibilities in engineering and management.

Guided the team towards a more mature Scrum, and gradually introducing TDD, pairing, code reviews, Git flow, an automated styleguide and CI practices, as well as facilitating meaningful retrospectives and actionable insights. Together, we grew to deliver at a constant and sustainable pace, releasing code to production every other day.

Great opportunity to explore growth tools. UX research, analytics, A/B testing, referrals, customer support, CRM, every trick in the book.

2011-2014

Moved to London in 2011 as the first backend developer of a greenfield project within EF - Education First. The prototypes evolved into field tests, and the tests evolved into a mature platform. And the role evolved into Tech Lead.

The platform runs at a global scale, around the clock, delivering free tests to millions of users, assisting teachers in dozens of schools, supporting some of the research behind the world's largest ranking of countries by English skills.

Also super proud to have helped building EF Class, an innovative EdTech product that helps teachers run engaging, interactive, and motivational lessons.

Lisbon, Portugal

2010

My last year in Portugal was spent working with friends at Quodis, a company of five, including some of the best UX / designers out there.

We were pumping complex websites, engaging campaigns and beautiful visualisations at an incredible pace.

And we still found time to organise meet-ups and events.

Great team, wonderful times :-)

2009

So excited about Scrum, after running a few ScrumBut explorations, that I got a CSP certification the next year.

Since then, regardless of my role as a Developer, Team Lead or Tech Lead, I have been at least half Scrum Master in most of the teams I have worked with, integrating valuable lessons about commitment, mindfulness, courage, respect and vulnerability.

2008

When I landed a web-developer role at Portugal Telecom's SAPO / Portugal Telecom portal I knew I had done something right. It was a superb opportunity to learn from the best engineers in Portugal at the time, and to have access to web at scale projects and mature tech.

While working there, built an entire new version of the SAPO Cinema vertical, on top of a service oriented architecture, designed from scratch to be low latency and high availability.

The popular online movies guide scaled 4x its audience after launching the new version and peaked around a million monthly unique users.

2005-2008

The WHATWG was rising, Firefox was launching. I was dreaming about a better web again and wanting to work full-time with web technologies.

Became a full-time frontend trainer/consultant, helping teams in media companies and digital agencies, (re)adjusting to a more modern web: going from closed source to open source, to semantic web standards, to more effective design/development collaboration.

2004

(Re)discovering Agile since I first came across a certain manifesto. In the early 2000s, I was mostly learning XP and Agile Modeling, and how to design and develop in collaboration, writing tests, pairing and reviewing code.

2002-2003

Carefully extracting myself from the marketing duties, and now leading the R&D department and a small team of brave developers, I co-created an innovative product, the first of the kind in the automation industry. Using mostly web technologies for UI, but also going full hands-on with industrial hardware - networks, card readers, gadgets and sensors of every kind - we created a unique modular system, capable of managing thousands of inputs and devices and integrating with other systems.

Good enough to manage the traffic flow in the carpark of an opera house. Or monitor thousands of spots in an airport's car park using sound sensors. Quite a reception from the market! When I left mid 2006 there were 20 instances operating across the country, and plans to go much further. Last time I checked, it was in production for over a decade and even sold to other countries.

2001

My one big shot at pretending to capitalism followed, kind of by chance. A young maverick heir with sufficient funds and guts, someone I had previously impressed with my mix of business and tech skills, trusted me to articulate his vision into a business plan for a technical spin-off of his family's more traditional company.

In the first 2 years we saw the new company become the most profitable business of the group and the market leader in the national mobility space, expanding its offering to traffic management, access control and automation integrations.

Meanwhile I had myself back into a role in marketing in the now familiar, very real, very gritty, mobility industry. But the business plan went beyond being a vendor and an integrator. We were also building prototypes for our own product, using Delphi, rudimentary electronics, and lots of creative glue. So we sold one, then two, then five. The product was viable, the demand was there.

1999-2000

Me and some friends created our own web-shop, developed a CMS in PHP3, streamlined a sales+delivery pipeline and went on to create websites for dozens of companies and institutions.

Unfortunately, as soon as this one and (so far) only attempt at being an entrepreneur was starting to look like a serious business, the dot-com bubble collapsed the market appetite for a couple of years. We were kind of late to the first party.

We had to move on, maybe jut for a while. But I think I became risk averse and never considered this path again.

1998

It was only when I found a more technical role in the parking systems and access control industry that I felt I was truly creating value.

Pre-sales opened the opportunity to get involved and very much hands-on. Business analysis, requirements gathering, modeling, architecture, prototyping. Started playing around with VB, Delphi, databases, reports and learning about RAD, Rational, UML.

Somehow also got involved in training technical and sales staff and took an eye-opening course on training and pedagogy.

1996-1997

The 2 years after graduating felt a bit inadequate. The degree in Economics lined me up for a brief experience in the public sector, as a naif techno-junior. And then in commerce, as a mini person-suit struggling to find any poetry in commerce.

I knew I could do so much more if I were creating things. Instead of audits, studies, deals.

1995

I was finishing university and creating my first personal website. The browsers at the time? Navigator and IE2. And dial-up bandwidth. On a good day, 30 kbps.

My story with computers goes way back.

Keyword dump

Management: product development, product management, technical product management, systems thinking, design thinking, service design, lean, kanban, design systems, release planning, technical debt management, risk management, coaching, mentoring, facilitation, people management

Engineering: architecture, modeling, distributed systems, high-availability, observability, xp, pairing, mobbing, tdd, bdd, ci-cd, web standards, typescript, javascript, react, angular, vue-js, astro, html, css, less, scss, web apis, tooling, node-js, scala, go, python, mongodb, couchbase, mysql, redis, rabbitmq, ansible, docker, terraform, cloud-formation, aws, gcp, azure

Kudos

Throughout these awesome almost 3 decades, I have had the chance of working in remarkable teams. Together, we have experimented different ways of creating value and experienced the joy of positively impacting lives through our work.

It has been an absolute privilege and pleasure to work alongside so many talented and inspiring individuals: business people, academics, engineers, and artists.

Particularly, the ones I had the even greater privilege of mentoring along the way. You all rock! And you will rule!

Next

You can learn more about my work in my LinkedIn profile.

Or more about my back story, right here on this website.

And always feel free to get in touch.