Career

Last week I was part of the 2nd online edition of Pycon Brazil. An inclusive event, with interpreters to Brazilian sign language, free admission, code of conduct and much more.

All my career I worked in places where people were better than me. Like… way better, in one thing or another. They were truly exceptional people.

This month is my 4 year anniversary of my first job as a developer. During this time I’ve had multiple jobs (startups, big companies and open source projects) and changed countries and continents. I was able to learn a couple of things that helped me improve my career and I wanted to share them as a celebration of my anniversary and everything that came with this new life.

I just watched an awesome lecture about how to have a five-digit salary in Brazil by Bruno Ticami (Python Brazil 2013). Here are some questions and advises that he talked about:

I talked to Tim Bourguignon at the Dev Journey podcast about career life and mentoring.

There are people who can play the piano wonderfully while others can’t even clap in rhythm (me). There are people who can express themselves well and people who cannot deal with the countless thoughts that flow through their brain. There are multiple types of intelligence. In the past few days I have had several philosophical conversations with people of all kinds. A recurring theme was a feeling of inability, of mediocrity, mixed with drops of sadness and a handful of blindness.

In April 2018 I started Udacity’s Nanodegree in Machine Learning Engineer. The classes are not cheap and many questions asked me the same thing: does it worth it?

This week I was asked to tell a little about how I became programmer (or at least, I’m in the process). I wrote this text to tell a little bit more about my story.

A friend of mine told me this week that she was invited to give a talk at a conference, and asked me what I thought about it. I told her all the things I consider when giving a talk and I discovered I consider a lot of things!

Leticia is a Brazilian developer who changed career to web development four years ago. She previously worked as an Oceanographer but caught the coding bug! Now she works as a developer at the payments solution company Stripe. She is a great example of a software engineer without a CS degree who has a successful career.

The lovely Pyladies-Salvador asked for a text to debut their blog and told me that they would publish it on Women’s Day. I reflected a lot on what to write, what I could somehow add to that day that has so much meaning, and decided that I would like to talk to you about ambition. How ambitious do you consider yourself?