Hello World!

That feeling... of following a tutorial online and printing on the console the most famous programming short sentence for the first time, kind of similar to what I'm doing here with my first official post in this blog!

I say first official post because I made at least 5+ different "test posts" in the past month to see all the components stitch together for this site. Putting this blog online was probably harder than I initially estimated, but here we are with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) online. Am I proud of the results? Hum... proud is a strong word, I'm feeling "ok" with it, for sure it is not perfect and I know it has some bugs/incomplete pages but as Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder) once said "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late". Embarrassed again feels like too strong, let's keep in the middle of that embarrassed-good-proud scale and crave: I'm good with it! This is a project I had at the back of my mind for a while now and I'm glad for finally launching it!

I can say I participated in many launches since 2008, successful ones, big failures... I joined the Information Technology (IT) industry "by accident" as a trainee at ExxonMobil here in Brazil while I was graduating as an Electrical Engineer and felt in love with the dynamism and opportunities. This was almost 15 years ago and I had the privilege of working so far for 2 different companies with a great diversity of assignments/challenges and great people that helped me broaden my view. I currently work as an Enterprise Architect at a startup called Olist, this is my current role, not the main one! If you want to know more details and whoami, checkout the About page or find me in LinkedIn using the button below. I can say that all of those launches (specially the failures) taught me valuable lessons! Still, I don't know how to explain this yet, but launching something for "me" feels different. Maybe I´ll get better at writing and expressing my feeling along the way here.

The first question I kind of feel obligated to answer/write about is: "What? A blog? really, this is sooooooooo 2000s! I'm pretty sure that blogging is dead!" (if you want to read more about the most famous blogging platform, take a look at the history of WordPress). Yes, nowadays there are so many options with different pros/cons and target audiences, for instance I could be writing in Medium or LinkedIn Articles or any social media out there (or even a combination of all of them to boost view counts) but I decided to go with this blog with my own domain to keep the content more "free and open" with less lock-in to a specific platform. I say less because I recognize that even with this approach there is always some level of lock-in. I will probably write more about those details in a future blog post about technology stack definitions and decisions I had to make.

Ok, so taking aside the discussion on the platform of choice for writing, another future-post-spoiler-alert-here: I'm joining the other 37% of the web and using WordPress as my Content Management System (CMS) for this blog, another question on your head could be: "What is the motivation to start journaling/writing?". This one, a much harder question to answer.

There were several people/factors/things that inspired me either directly or indirectly to start this journey. A few of those examples:

• I remember talking to a friend 3-4 years ago about doing something to start generating content online not tied to a specific company
• Another vivid memory is discussing with one of the persons I take as one of my mentors and the insight he gave me about sharing broadly (outside of the company I was working for) the views/technology concepts I presented in an internal Digital Academy MBA-like course where I talked about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital transformation using Architecture & Technology as the backbone. Both got the highest ratings among all presentations from the participants surveys and at the end I was like, ok... now what should I do with those materials?
• Reading the great book "The Software Architect Elevator" that was recommended to me by a coworker where the author Gregor Hohpe talks about the importance for us to give it back to the community and have a presence online
• Seeing others take the initiative, get out of the comfort zone and start sharing/writing

So, now that I decided to do something about it, what should I do now? Where should I start? I decided to take Simon Sinek's Golden Circle advice and start with the why. I did a "motivations"/why brainstorm exercise to, if needed, come back here in the future and keep me focused on the things that I wanted to accomplish with this blog when I decided to create it. The image below is probably version 0.001 of the blog, the first thing I did before I even had a name for it:

Just adding more details for each of those cards:

• Create "open source" content: I said this already, this should be a place to share content more broadly not tied to any company
• Learn new skills: I am motivated by learning new stuff. There are several things that I want to learn and I will share those learnings/moments here
• As cheap as possible: Well... the costs associated with this blog are coming out of my pocket and currently 1 USD =~ 6 BRL so I need to be extra careful with every penny
• Be a "lazy" programmer: It was hard for me to find the time to put this blog together and I anticipate the same will be truth for writing posts, so everything I can reuse or find ready-to-use online that will save me some time must be used!
• Have Fun: What is the purpose of life if we don´t have fun? Same applies here! If this become an obligation maybe it is time to pivot to something else
• Keep up with my english writing: I am not a native English speaker/writer and after 13 years using english in meetings, emails and presentations with my coworkers from multiple countries, I work now for a brazilian company and portuguese (PT-BR) is what I use the most on a daily basis. I´m trying to find ways to keep up with my English skills and this blog feels like a great opportunity

I told you it was a hard question to answer! Hopefully you now have a better idea where I want to go with this blog so please, grab a cup of coffee (technology and coffee go very well together), raise it/toast with me and let's celebrate: to a new beginning and successful launch!

I hope you too have fun together with me in this journey!

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(please come back!)