About Me

A little more about me.

Hello, I’m Raphael Abreu

I live in Brasilia, BR.

I took an interest in the technology area due to my father’s exclusive influence: a retired professor in statistical mathematics and physics. For a long time, he worked with Visual Basic, Delphi, and other things I can’t remember anymore — always looking at a dusty bookcase with several technology books and magazines. I loved spending the afternoon at his job because besides playing Warcraft 2, I still had access to the internet.

Blizzard Entertainment – Warcraft II

My mom, a retired English teacher, always brought me external references, and that also helped me think out of the box. Another interesting thing is that my family developed a taste for art: singing, theater, dancing, and playing musical instruments. I’ve always liked to have bands and spend some time in recording studios — these were some of the best times of my life and it was how I ended up meeting the girl who became my wife a few years later.

My first PC arrived a little late at our house, and before that, I spent part of the time at the home of a few friends who had x386 and x486 with their incredible processing power. At that time, there was always a product sales catalog attached with the Sunday newspaper. We woke up early one day and went straight to the store to buy our first computer.

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

My experience with programming started with Pascal, C, C++, and then Java. In mid-2004 at the university, I was already concerned with user experience, and my C programs had “forms” designed in ASCII to receive data input. I remember prototyping graphical user interfaces using the Visual Basic design tool embedded in Microsoft Excel and then switching to the NetBeans GUI editor. My first book was “Structured Algorithms, 3rd Edition.”

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 area, we cannot always have the option to work with top-notch projects, and due to some situations, I have had to develop a generalist approach. This characteristic led me to deal with managers, directors, and stakeholders very early on. That gave me opportunities to think more critically, and it stood out in my communication — both written and oral.

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.