About Me

A little more about me.

Hello, I’m Raphael Abreu

I live in Brasilia, BR.

I took an interest in technology due to my father’s influence — a retired professor of statistical mathematics and physics. For a long time, he worked with Visual Basic, Delphi, and other things I can’t remember anymore. I always saw a dusty bookcase filled with technology books and magazines. I loved spending afternoons at his workplace because, besides playing Warcraft II, I also had access to the internet.

Blizzard Entertainment – Warcraft II

My mom, a retired English teacher, always exposed me to external references, which helped me think outside the box. Another interesting thing about my family is that we all developed a taste for the arts — singing, theater, dancing, and playing musical instruments. I’ve always enjoyed playing in bands and spending time in recording studios; those were some of the best times of my life and how I ended up meeting the girl who would later become my wife.

I’ve always had a thing for music — my family, especially my parents and grandparents had a big influence. It’s amazing how sound waves can shape your mood, push you into focus, or fill you with energy and happiness. There’s some insane math behind it all.

My first PC arrived a bit late at our house, and before that, I used to spend time at the homes of a few friends who had x386 and x486 machines with their incredible processing power. Back then, a product catalog always came with the Sunday newspaper. One day, we woke up early and went straight to the store to buy our first computer.

IBM PC 100 Personal Computer (not this one exactly, but pretty close!)

My programming journey began with Pascal, C, and C++, before moving on to Java. By mid-2004, while at university, I was already interested in user experience — my C programs even featured “forms” built in ASCII to receive data input. I remember prototyping graphical interfaces using the Visual Basic design tool embedded in Microsoft Excel and later switching to the NetBeans GUI editor. My first programming book was “Structured Algorithms, 3rd Edition.”

Feels like it was just yesterday, but I’ll never forget how it took several seconds just to display a single JOptionPane message on the screen. I’ve always been really attached to small details. I think that also had a lot to do with how I used to try to recreate comic book heroes with paper and pencil.

A real challenge for any aspiring software developer!

With Java, it was not much different… I will never forget how expensive it was to execute a java command on the terminal. I wish there were more programming classes in university.

But not everything was always focused on UX and neat things. My first job was as an associate developer for Natural and Cobol languages, using DB2 and ADABAS as persistent storage. My manager liked the idea of having a hybrid profile working with mainframe and new (low) platforms.

After this working experience, I was introduced to Slackware, Fedora, and SUSE Linux distros with an extremely multidisciplinary and highly qualified team of 6–8 people. Some of them became my best friends. Over the next few years, I was able to develop in other languages that I liked such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Scala.

In the software development field, we don’t always have the opportunity to work on top-notch projects, and due to certain circumstances, I’ve had to develop a generalist approach. This trait led me to interact with managers, directors, and stakeholders very early in my career. It gave me opportunities to think more critically, and it also helped me stand out in both written and verbal communication.

I have been working with activities related to software development and architecture of middleware components, navigating between the areas of technology, application, and solution architectures. I hope to bring some of these experiences here! I hope to contribute a little to anyone who wants to overcome day-2 challenges.