For a long time I had an office with partners and my daily schedule was getting in contact with new potential customers and offering our services, like creation of sites, e-commerces or even campaigns in Google Ads. My partners took care of the job of each new customer. Besides that, all the complementary tasks were on my charge: financial controls, keep-housing of the office, supplies, bills and a lot of other boring ones.
Even with a good incoming, my mind was always asking me: what did you learn today? And my answer was always the same. Nothing new!
It was very different of my years before, when I always was creating new things, developing ideas, proposing changes. All my long career was plentiful with these kinds of challenges. Why I stopped? Why I changed this way?
For many times I developed ideas and services on the internet, some good, some not good, but it always was captivating and exciting.
Looking outside I saw an effervescent flow of new tools, new challenges and a new great community. And I was losing time. No new studies, no new learning, no new ideas.
One day, after balancing all pros and cons, I decided to change. I know that it would be a big challenge, but I realised that it was necessary. The IT area never stopped, and there was a long way to be recovered.
Then, it was time to change. I undid my partnership, I closed my office and sold all things that were inside it. All my new activities will be done from my house or from where I could stay with an internet connection.
The job was changed to a study plan. First, learning a new way to develop mobile apps. The old knowledge in Cordova (HTML/CSS/Javascript) should be replaced with a modern tool: Flutter, a new concept of development. Then, recreating old apps or creating new ones or even doing proof of concept, this new knowledge was learned (https://pratic.com.br/).
But I wanted more. Then, in contact with new words that I started to hear in videos or posts, I was introduced to Artificial Intelligence. It was a new world to me. No more writing commands to solve a problem to achieve a result (my way since I started to work), but using the input data and the desired result, with correct tools, the machine will have a better way to solve a problem. And how much I dive in this field, more surprises for me. So many fields of work: machine learning, natural language recognition, computational vision, deep learning and one endless of names and techniques. It is not just a new world, it is a kind of dream!
It was the time to explore this new journey. I spent days and days studying, reproducing examples, taking classes and producing some new ideas. One of them was to use my new knowledge to get more information about a city where I do a volunteer job (https://cidadeemnumeros.com.br/) and show new things on my site of social control. Web scraping is a great tool to do this job.
Joining my business background with these tools I could create real solutions (like this one or this one, for example).
In the last few months I led a remote group of data scientists in a company, working for a digital bank in Brazil, in your data drive journey. There, we could create solutions for problems using tools like XGBoost, NLP, Market Basket Analysis. This job brought me a known situation, the inflexible hours of a job.
Now I want to combine these experiences: continue studying and work with new technologies and flexibilities to work from Now I want to combine these experiences: continue studying and work with new technologies and have flexibility to work from anywhere, anytime. When the Covid allows, I want to travel abroad and work from where I can reach. The Internet will be a good companion.
When I see pages like https://www.toptal.com/data-science I am confident that it is possible. Why not?
Besides the business, and in order to get more practical experience, I participated in some great events:
- Nasa International Space Apps Challenge 2020
- Behind The Code IBM 2020 (2º in challenge 2 and 87º in global classification)
- Mega Hack Shawee – Desafio Veloe
- Curitiba Smart Hack – Equipe 8 Massa (9º place)