About

I discovered code on a small farm in Brazil around 1998. I was 15, with a second-hand computer, an MS-DOS 6.0 book, and no internet. No friends nearby. No access to technical knowledge. Just a kid who wanted to be an inventor.

One afternoon, between building small electronic devices and a metal Wolverine claw (yes, really), I stumbled upon a file called GORILA.BAS — a demo that came with QBasic. I opened it, saw colored lines of code, and felt something click. I had found a universe that was natural to me.

That discovery set off over 25 years of building things.

From satellites to startups

At 19, I landed a research fellowship at INPE — Brazil’s National Space Research Institute. Dream job for any nerd: infinite electronic components, fascinating projects, brilliant people. I wrote Linux kernel drivers for satellite communication hardware with 99.5% accuracy and ranked first among 40 students.

But science in Brazil doesn’t pay. My stipend was ~$50/month. So I moved to the private sector.

At Embraer, I spent 7 years learning to build production systems. I started in a non-technical area (aircraft technical publications) and quickly began automating processes with bash scripts on Sun Microsystems machines. Embraer gave me time to earn my Computer Engineering degree, study Applied Mathematics, and grow as an engineer.

After 7 years, I felt trapped. I wanted to fly further.

Building, failing, building again

I quit and co-founded a startup. In 2008, before WordPress was mainstream in Brazil, we built a food delivery ordering system from scratch — PHP, MySQL, classic startup spaghetti code.

That system processed over $6 million in transactions, reached every Brazilian state and expanded to Latin America. But we fell into the classic building trap — adding features to turn it into an ERP, losing the product’s innovative essence. Then a player called iFood entered the market. The rest is history.

We kept trying until 2018. Two or three more projects that didn’t work out, burning investor money and our own. At one point, I was married, had a son, walking 12km daily because I couldn’t afford gas. Working remotely for Solvay — a €10B+ Belgian multinational chemical company — from 3AM to noon serving their European operation, at the office until 5PM, then teaching at a local university until 11PM. Sleeping 3 hours a night. For two years.

That period taught me something no CS degree can: the difference between surviving and building.

30,000 students and a digital business

I broke free and bet on something I’d been flirting with — teaching programming online. In 2016, I created my first course: “Programar do Zero” (Code from Zero), teaching non-programmers how to code. It was somewhat innovative at the time — programming was still discussed mainly in academic circles in Brazil.

It worked. Over $1 million in revenue. 30,000+ students. 80,000 YouTube subscribers. During the pandemic, it boomed. At its peak, the organic revenue was $10-14K/month, and with paid traffic, $60K/month.

Going global

In 2022, I joined TUI Group — the world’s largest tourism company (€23B revenue) — as Tech Lead for the global checkout system. Working remotely from Brazil, I directed a 12-member team across 4 European markets, building a multi-currency transaction system processing 5M+ annual bookings with 25 microservices and 99.9% uptime.

After Solvay and TUI, I had proven I could deliver at enterprise scale across time zones and cultures — fully remote, from Brazil to Europe.

Then AI changed everything

In 2024, I realized I couldn’t grow further personally or professionally inside my “digital business working 4 hours a week.” The rise of AI coding agents fundamentally changed what was possible.

I adopted Spec Driven Development — writing specifications before code, letting AI agents execute against those contracts, reviewing and shipping. I trained 400+ professionals in the methodology.

Then I decided to prove it works at scale.

Crypto Fintech: 13 apps in 70 days

In late 2025, I built a complete crypto fintech. Solo. In 70 days. Using Claude Code guided by specifications.

The platform includes a payment gateway with PIX integration — Brazil’s instant payment system (3B+ monthly transactions, comparable to India’s UPI) — connected to 4 providers via factory pattern with HMAC-SHA256 webhook validation and mTLS client certificates.

It also features an OTC exchange engine with VWAP pricing (24h rolling window), cross-rates from 5 aggregated sources with median + outlier filtering, and asymmetric bid/ask spreads. The exchange settler handles on-chain deposit detection (10s polling), 2-block confirmation, tolerance-based auto-refund, and crash recovery.

The full stack: 13 applications, 3 Fastify APIs, 3 PostgreSQL databases, full OAuth 2.1/OIDC (5 roles, 19 scopes, 18 granular permissions, 2FA), Kubernetes with auto-scaling, Terraform IaC, and Prometheus/Grafana monitoring.

Real money flowing through the system. Not a prototype. Not a toy project. Production-grade fintech with compliance.

The secret wasn’t the AI. It was the specification.

What I’m doing now

I’m building educational content — an ebook, course, and YouTube series on Spec Driven Development — because AI changed how we write code, but not how we think about it.

If any of this resonates, let’s talk.