I didn’t start programming with a career plan.

There was no roadmap, no carefully chosen stack, and no long-term goal of becoming a software engineer.

It started with curiosity.

In 2022, I began building Discord bots simply because I wanted to understand how things worked behind the scenes. I wanted to make something respond to a command, interact with an API, automate a task, and eventually turn an idea into something that actually worked.

At the time, I didn’t know where that curiosity would take me.

Four years later, I’m working as a Software Engineer at Nubank, building systems that operate at a completely different scale.

This is the story in between.

2022 — It started with Discord bots

My first real contact with programming happened in 2022, through Discord bots.

I wasn’t studying Computer Science. I wasn’t working in technology. I didn’t even have a clear career plan.

I was simply curious.

I wanted to understand how bots worked, how APIs communicated, how events triggered actions, and how different pieces of software could interact with each other.

At first, the goal was just to make things work.

But every project created another question.

How does this work internally?

Why does this fail?

How can I automate this?

How can I make it more reliable?

That curiosity became the foundation for everything that followed.

2024 — My first job and the beginning of my degree

In 2024, I started working at Leroy Merlin as a customer service attendant.

At the same time, I started my degree in Systems Analysis and Development.

This was an important transition.

For the first time, I was combining two different worlds: the practical experience of working directly with customers and the technical foundation I was beginning to develop through college.

Working outside technology also taught me something that would become increasingly important throughout my career:

technology exists to solve real problems.

It is easy to become focused on code, frameworks and architectures. But behind every system there is usually a person, a process, or a business problem that needs to be solved.

Customer service gave me a perspective that I wouldn’t have gained from code alone.

2025 — From automation to data

While still working at Leroy Merlin, I started looking for ways to improve the processes around me.

One of those problems became an opportunity to build an automation.

What started as an attempt to eliminate a repetitive operational bottleneck eventually changed the direction of my career.

I began working more closely with the data team and started using Python, BI tools, dashboards and integrations to solve operational problems.

This was the point where I began to understand that software engineering wasn’t only about writing code.

It was also about understanding a problem, finding patterns in data, reducing manual work and building systems that make people more effective.

I started moving from:

“How can I automate this?”

to:

“What is the actual problem we are trying to solve?”

That shift changed the way I approached technology.

2026 — From intern to Software Engineer at Nubank

In 2026, I joined Nubank as a Software Engineering intern.

It was a completely different environment from anything I had experienced before.

I was now working with production systems, distributed technologies, experimentation and software operating at a much larger scale.

My work is part of the Growth Engineering squad within Lending, where I work on customer-facing experiences for credit products.

My stack includes technologies such as Clojure, Datomic and Kafka, and my responsibilities have expanded beyond simply implementing features.

I work with experimentation, analytics, server-driven experiences and the engineering processes required to safely ship changes in high-scale systems.

Over time, I also took on more ownership of features and began participating in on-call responsibilities.

Later in the year, I transitioned from an intern role to a full-time Software Engineer position.

That transition meant more than a change in title.

It represented a change in responsibility.

I went from learning how things were built to being accountable for helping build and operate them.

The common thread

Looking back, these stages might seem unrelated.

Discord bots.

Customer service.

Automation.

Data.

Software engineering.

But there is a common thread connecting all of them:

I have always been interested in making things work better.

The technology changed.

The scale changed.

The problems became more complex.

But the underlying curiosity remained the same.

In 2022, I wanted to understand how a Discord bot could respond to a command.

Today, I think about how software behaves across distributed systems, how experiments affect thousands of users, how data informs product decisions, and how to build systems that remain reliable as they scale.

The questions simply became more interesting.

Still at the beginning

I don’t see this journey as a finished story.

I’m still learning.

There are technologies I haven’t mastered, systems I haven’t designed, and problems I haven’t encountered yet.

That’s one of the things I like most about software engineering: there is always another layer to understand.

My path into technology wasn’t linear, and it wasn’t planned from the beginning.

It started with curiosity, grew through experimentation, and eventually became a career.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far, it’s this:

you don’t always need to know where you’re going to start moving.

Sometimes, you just need to build the first thing.

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My journey in Tech!