I’ve always liked writing about things I am learning or have a real interest on, and, I’ve been writing online for “as long as I can remember”, going back to my contributions on a Physics forum while I was still in high school.

It was also around that time that I discovered programming and it immediately sparked my interest!

As a newbie in the field, still graduating from high school, and, with prospects of enrolling into Civil Engineering (this was…. 2009/10 or so? Market for software engineers in Portugal at that time was bleak at best when compared to Civil Engineering) I got more exposure to the field by means of algorithmic competitions, attending monthly contests in websites like Codechef and it was back then when the “writing bug” really bit and I started writing in the associated blog.

While it was mostly a niche, and mostly about algorithms, I was fortunate to have a huge audience reading it thanks to the popularity of the website, and, after a span of a few months (years maybe?) I had posts being featured on the main page, and so far, the most popular of them has amassed an impressive 231k views and is featured as the top result on a Google Search for “Computing Factorials of a huge number in C/C++” which is quite nice! This was back in March 2013! Ancient history!

After a somewhat intense period of being very active and contributing a lot there, I kind of halted my writing and eventually switched to and graduated from Computer Science, and started my career as a software developer.

In this period, I kept reading stuff online and learning a lot from lots of people, and, my second “real” writing experience came in the form of answering Quora questions. Here I ended up pivoting on my focus and decided to start looking at software development as a broader discipline past the whacky algorithmic competitions. It’s truly enlightning (or well, it was for me at the time) just how much broader the software engineering field was besides the closed competitions I was used to. As I was working on a product-based company in my first real job working integrated in a team, this also became the dominant factor for the type of content which I consumed and engaged with and this was the phase where I delved deeper into software architecture principles, clean code, the SOLID principles and all these things that make software development a true engineering discipline, much more than only algorithms. My time at Quora was quite nice, and, well, the numbers are not too bad:

A total of 529 answers and a combined total of 906.000 content views, which is an absolutely insane realization for me! It benefits from the format of course, questions and short answers can be consumed in bulk while scrolling idly while you go about your life, so, the value the actual content brings for the readers is probably debatable, I’d wager. Still quite impressive numbers for someone with no formal writing experience or training whatsoever.

Then, more recently, I joined the dev.to website, which became popular for me thanks to popping up frequently in Google Discover and the Google Newsfeed. Some of the posts were quite nice and the writers are all people like me, so, developers working in product-based companies, or maintaining open-source software and people who are “in the trenches” hashing out the real and ugly stuff, writing the code. My current run at dev.to has been quite decent so far:

Almost 100k views for 60 written posts, an hackathon entry submission and some interesting things learned.

Followers here are probably not fully representative of the real audience exposed to my content since most of them will be bots, deactivated accounts or “one-offs” who don’t really engage with the content in any meaningful manner.

Sadly, given that this is an open-source community (this is just a theory, probably biased) it tends, as most open-source communities nowadays, to “converge to JS”, where most content becomes dominated by Javascript posts, news, announcements, etc. I think this is due to the fact that a lot of people involved in open-source tend to end up maintaining, contributing or working on projects whose main technology is Javascript just because it is ubiquous on the web and it is somewhat unavoidable. The side effect of this is of course that the content reflects the world views of the authors who produce it, so, here we are.

Since I have worked during my entire career so far as a back-end developer, I decided I want to have a space where I can freely write about anything I want, having my own views on topics of my own interest without feeling like I am trying to swim against the current by not highlighting Javascript or related technologies, so, this is the reason why this space was created!

The idea will be to discuss aspects related to product development, software engineering and agile methodologies in a broad, over-arching fashion, and, more down to the details, I will be writing about Java and Python which are the technologies I work with the most and that interest me the most! Let’s see what comes out of this!