Warning before someone pretends not to understand: this is personal opinion. This is not financial, legal, tax, electoral, marital, spiritual advice, or a recipe. The details here are Brazil-specific. If you are going to touch companies, assets, taxes, marriage, inheritance, tax residency, or anything that can wreck your life, talk to a real accountant and a real lawyer. Not me. Not an influencer. Not a Twitter thread.

Brazilian elections are coming and the internet has already turned into a stadium.

Red shirt on one side. Yellow shirt on the other. In the middle, adults behaving as if an election were a championship final. They scream, insult, paste stickers, share convenient clips, call relatives stupid on WhatsApp, then think they are “participating in democracy.”

Big deal.

After 50 years watching this movie, my recommendation is simple: stop cheering. Treat politics as a risk you manage, the same way you deal with rain, traffic, and exchange rates. A party is, at most, a supplier of public policy. An election is an event on the calendar. Your adult life has to stand on its own, without hanging any of it on the role of father, family, or shield.

I am not telling you to become alienated. Read the news. Understand risk. Vote if you want to vote. I vote. Just do not hand your sanity to this. Your daily anxiety, your huge rant, your fight in the family group chat, and your individual vote will not fix a structure built over decades.

They will not.

If things improve, great. But plan as if they will not.

Politics became soccer

Brazilians understand team loyalty very well. Corinthians, Palmeiras, Flamengo, São Paulo. Your team loses, hires badly, piles up debt, drops to second division, and you stay. Because it is identity. Shirt. Tribe.

The problem is carrying that brain into politics.

In soccer, fine, it is entertainment. In politics, it becomes organized stupidity. The person defends a crest instead of a public policy. When bad numbers appear, they double down instead of revisiting the position. They ignore debt, taxes, inflation, exchange rate, pensions, productivity, education, legal certainty, and only want to know whether “my side” won.

That is useless.

Worse: it makes you vulnerable. Because you start planning your life on top of hope.

“Now it will work.”

“This time it changes.”

“If this person wins, it gets better.”

“If this person loses, it is over.”

Stop.

Plan like an adult. Your plan needs to work with any president, any Congress, any finance minister, any new madness invented in Brasília.

The bill always arrives

Brazil has high debt, high public spending, high taxes, bad services, and too many rules. No election deletes that by decree.

According to the Central Bank, gross general government debt ended 2025 at 78.7% of GDP, near R$ 10 trillion. You can argue methodology, IMF criteria, Treasury bonds in the Central Bank’s portfolio, whatever you want. Do it if you enjoy the subject. The practical point remains: the bill is big.

When the State spends more than it collects for too long, the bill appears somewhere. It appears in taxes. It appears in interest rates. It appears in inflation. It appears in weak currency. It appears in bad service. It appears in bureaucracy. It appears in investment that never came.

Populism is seductive because it promises a benefit now and sends the bill to later. But “later” arrives. It arrives as IPCA. It arrives as a more expensive dollar. It arrives as high interest rates. It arrives as wages that do not follow the cost of living.

A common confusion: saying inflation is “caused by price increases.” That reverses cause and consequence. The Central Bank defines inflation as an increase in prices and a loss of purchasing power. That is how inflation appears. The root, when inflation is persistent and spread through the economy, involves money, credit, demand, expectations, and fiscal conditions. The Cleveland Fed explains the long-term relation between money growth and the price level. The IMF calls one extreme case fiscal dominance: when debt and deficits start bossing monetary policy around.

Supermarket prices going up are the symptom, and most people confuse the symptom with the root.

Of course one product can go up because of oil, bad harvest, war, exchange rate, tax, cartel, logistics. But localized abuse does not explain decades of generalized purchasing-power loss. Turning companies into scapegoats is convenient for politicians. Convenient does not mean true.

Over the last 20 years, according to the Central Bank’s SGS data, accumulated IPCA from July 2006 to May 2026 was near 197%. Prices almost tripled. The PTAX sell rate went from roughly R$ 2.16 per dollar on 2006-06-30 to roughly R$ 5.18 on 2026-06-30. The Real buys a lot fewer dollars.

You do not need sophisticated theory. Just remember what groceries, a car, rent, school, or health insurance used to cost.

Brazil will not become Switzerland in four years

Another fantasy: “now public services will improve.”

I hope so. Seriously. I hope they improve. But I would not plan my life betting on it.

Public health care? If you depend on it, I honestly hope you are well served. But I would not build my family plan around a miracle. ANS counted around 52.9 million beneficiaries in private medical-hospital plans in March 2026. The 2022 Census measured Brazil at 203.1 million people. Most people depend directly or indirectly on SUS and public infrastructure.

When the system fails, it fails on real people. G1 reported in June 2026 the case of Vilmar Pereira da Silva, 49, who died in a waiting room at a UPA in Brasília. It also reported in Sorocaba the death of a 14-year-old boy who, according to the family, waited 18 hours at a UPA. I am not using two cases as a national statistic. I am reminding you that abstraction becomes a body when things go wrong.

Public education? If you have kids, be brutally honest: do you want to bet 15 years of their education waiting for an educational revolution that may never come?

In PISA 2022, Brazil scored 379 in math, 410 in reading, and 403 in science, against OECD averages of 472, 476, and 485. That is genuinely weak foundation, far from being just an ideological dispute.

I know most people cannot pay for private health care and private school. That is exactly the problem. The country is expensive, public service is bad, and the private alternative is also expensive.

Denying reality does not improve reality.

I saw money melt

I grew up in the 80s. I saw hyperinflation. Prices changed the same day. Money melted in your hand. Families had to do survival math. Then came Collor and the savings confiscation.

For young people, that sounds like ancient history. For me it is memory.

Hyperinflation has a known, well-documented cause. It usually starts with a government spending more than it can, debt nobody wants to face, and the temptation to cover the hole by printing money. Looks clever for five minutes. Then it becomes an invisible tax on everybody.

But even in chaos, some people make money, and they are the ones who understand the mechanics, not the ones who happen to be more virtuous than the rest.

Think of a simple store. It receives cash today and pays the supplier in 30 days. If it buys Cr$ 1 million in inventory and only pays the supplier next month, with 30% monthly inflation, that Cr$ 1 million paid later buys much less. Meanwhile, it sells the inventory at adjusted prices. The customer thinks the merchant got rich because “prices went up.” Sometimes the merchant merely survived the interval. Sometimes he made a lot in the interval.

Now think about money sitting for a few days. A company receives payment slips on day 5 and pays payroll on day 30. If Cr$ 10 million stays in the cash account for 25 days and overnight yields close to 1% per day, that becomes roughly Cr$ 12.8 million before payroll. Payroll’s nominal amount is still there. The gain came from time. From float.

Banks did this at a much larger scale. They captured money paying one rate, lent or invested it charging another, and turned huge volumes every day. If the difference looked small, a few points per month, on billions it became a fortune. Spread and float. Ugly names for something simple: whoever received before paying, and knew where to park the money in the middle, won. Whoever received a salary at the end of the month and ran to the supermarket lost.

And it did not have to be a bank. An organized individual could also play a better game. If he knows the currency is melting, he does not leave everything sitting in cruzeiros waiting for it to turn into dust. He buys dollars when he can. He buys shares of exporters that earn in dollars. He uses futures or options to hedge, not to play casino. Simple example: you have money you will only use in 30 days. If you leave it in rotten currency, you lose. If you buy dollar protection and the exchange rate explodes, you understood the game before everyone else, and luck had nothing to do with it. Of course: options, forex, and leverage break amateurs faster than inflation. To be clear, this is not an invitation to play trader. The point is simpler: financial knowledge turns chaos into opportunity, while ignorance turns salary into dust.

That is why inflation destroys the poor and the disorganized first. Whoever lives on a fixed salary arrives late to the race. Whoever understands payment terms, inventory, debt, cash, and currency plays another game.

That was the environment where the Collor Plan arrived. To try to control hyperinflation by force, the government did something brutal: it forcibly removed liquidity from people’s hands. The Senate summarizes it: MP 168/1990 blocked, for 18 months, amounts above NCz$ 50 thousand in accounts, savings, and financial investments. In practice, families and companies woke up with their own money locked by the State. Decades later, Collor returned to politics and served as senator for Alagoas.

This is a lesson Brazilians should tattoo on their foreheads: do not wait for “justice” to come. Do not expect the people who destroyed lives to pay proportionally. Do not expect the system to recognize your effort and protect you.

The system protects the system.

You protect you.

Stop outsourcing your life

Your plan cannot depend on an election.

If I had to summarize my strategy, it would be something like this:

• learn real English;
• build a profession you can sell outside Brazil;
• understand taxes and accounting;
• protect assets legally;
• raise children without depending on the State, if that is possible for you;
• know competent people in areas you do not dominate.

None of this is sexy. It does not make a slogan. It does not go viral.

It works better than hope.

English and dollars are not fetishes

English is oxygen in the global market. A lot of people still treat it as a fancy differentiator, when it has already become a basic survival requirement.

There is a reason this was one of the first videos on my channel: Akitando #32 - Como eu aprendi inglês e entendendo padrões.

Not every Brazilian profession is exportable. Programming is one of the ones that are. Even with a harder remote market, layoffs, global competition, and AI messing everything up, there is still a path. It is not easy. It never was. It only looked easy during the bubble.

You start local. Gain experience. Study more than the others. Learn to communicate. Improve your English. Apply abroad. Get rejected. Apply again. Continue.

This is decades of work, not a six-month turnaround.

The goal is simple: increase your chance of being paid in hard currency.

Why dollars? Because the dollar is still the center of the international financial system, through pure mechanics, and not because I cheer for the US. After Bretton Woods, and even after the end of gold convertibility in 1971, the dollar remained the main currency for reserves, trade, debt, and liquidity. The BIS shows that the dollar is involved in almost 90% of global FX transactions and appears in about half of global trade invoiced in foreign currency.

In the 80s, the Plaza Accord coordinated a devaluation of the dollar against currencies like the yen and the Deutsche mark. FOMC materials from 1985 already recorded the dollar roughly 14% lower against the yen weeks later. The real story mixes currency, interest rates, trade, geopolitics, and debt, well beyond the simplistic “US imperialism” version.

When a geopolitical crisis raises oil prices, importing countries need more dollars to buy energy. Reuters showed this during the Iran-US war: the dollar rose on safe-haven demand, higher oil prices, and Strait of Hormuz risk. Sanctions and alternatives exist, but that does not prove the end of the dollar. It proves the opposite: everyone needs to work around the dominant network precisely because it is dominant.

You do not need to like the dollar to understand that it runs the game.

The Real works poorly as a long-term store of value. If you can keep part of your income, assets, or client base in hard currency, you become less vulnerable. Simple as that.

Taxes are part of adulthood

Brazilian salaried CLT workers often think they understand taxes because they open the Federal Revenue program once a year and click “next.”

They do not.

It looks simple because the hard part is hidden. The company pays a mountain before your net salary appears. Then you pay income tax, contributions, taxes embedded in products, services, consumption, property, notary fees, capital gains, inheritance.

The Federal Revenue estimated the tax burden at 32.3% of GDP in 2023. The last comparable World Bank Doing Business report put a standard Brazilian company at 1,501 hours per year just to comply with tax obligations. The report was discontinued, so do not use it as a current ranking. Use it as a picture of the monster’s size.

And most people do not know the difference between income, assets, capital gains, pro-labore, dividends, declared offshore, evasion, lawful avoidance, tax residency, holding company, probate, ITCMD, IRPF, IRPJ, ISS, ICMS, PIS, Cofins.

They mix everything.

Offshore is not automatically tax evasion. It can be illegal if used to hide assets, omit income, defraud creditors, or launder money. But an international structure that is declared, has identified beneficial owners, correct accounting, and taxes paid under the applicable law is not a crime by definition. You can find it ugly. You can find it unfair. Just do not call everything by the wrong name.

In practice, what matters is obeying the real law, not repeating internet memes.

You buy property. Years later, you sell for more nominal reais. It looks like profit. Sometimes it is just inflation. Even so, if there is taxable capital gain under the fiscal rule, the government taxes the nominal difference according to the applicable rules.

Simplified example: you bought a house for R$ 500 thousand in 2006. Sold it in 2026 for R$ 1.2 million. It looks like a R$ 700 thousand gain. With accumulated IPCA near 197%, that house would need to be worth around R$ 1.485 million just to preserve purchasing power. Before tax, you already lost in real terms.

On paper, “profit.” In real life, loss.

You die. Your heirs discover probate, notary offices, lawyers, ITCMD, deadlines, family conflict, and cost.

I am not saying every family needs a holding company. I am saying you need to know how to do the math before someone dies, not after.

Assets need structure

This is where many people misunderstand on purpose.

To be clear, I am not talking about hiding assets, evading taxes, defrauding creditors, or transferring assets after being sued to try to escape enforcement. That is illegal, voidable, and stupid.

I am saying to study estate and asset planning before buying big things on impulse.

A holding company, patrimonial company, corporate structure, will, insurance, private pension, international account, or declared offshore can make sense. It depends on the case.

“It depends on the case” is the most important sentence. Do not copy an influencer’s structure. Do not open a company in the Bahamas because you saw a video. Consult a professional.

A good holding company is not tax magic. It may have ITBI, capital gains, annual cost, accounting, ancillary obligations, anti-abuse rules, and piercing risk if you make a mess. It does not make assets immune to creditors, enforcement, division, or fraud against creditors.

It only replaces improvisation with governance.

The principle is simple: everything directly under your CPF is exposed to your CPF. Lawsuits, divorce, probate, family disputes, tax mistakes, corporate confusion, debt, accidents. A legitimate structure organizes risk, succession, administration, and tax within the law.

The important thing is not improvising assets when it is already too late.

Marriage, children, and contracts

Marriage is love, of course. Before the State, it is also a contract.

A bad contract destroys assets, family, and peace.

Brazil has property regimes. Partial community, universal community, conventional separation, mandatory separation in some cases, final participation in aquestos. Many people marry without understanding any of this.

I consider total separation of assets the most respectful way to marry.

Separating assets is the opposite of loving less: it is trusting enough that you do not need to trap the other person’s wallet to prove the feeling. Each person keeps clarity about what is theirs, what belongs to the other, and what is built together by explicit decision.

This still allows generosity, buying things together, and building a life in common. It only avoids pretending affection replaces accounting.

And children?

If you can choose, have children when you can pay for private health care and education.

I know that sentence irritates people. Better to be irritated now than to discover too late that the State will not deliver what you imagined.

A child is a whole person who depends on you, not an adult accessory or an Instagram project to sort out in the “we will figure it out later.”

If you want children, plan. Health insurance, school, housing, savings, language, safety, time, family nearby. If you cannot yet, work so you can.

Optionality

Do not leave your life hanging from a single point of failure.

One currency. One bank. One employer. One country. One expired document. One platform that can ban you. One broker that can freeze. One income source that can disappear.

That is fragility disguised as simplicity.

Having a valid passport, a visa when it makes sense, a declared international account, reserves in hard currency, a resume sellable abroad, contacts outside your bubble, and the ability to work remotely does not mean you are leaving tomorrow. It means you can choose.

No government needs to persecute you to destroy your life. Sometimes it is enough to change a rule, freeze an account, raise a tax, delay a document, or slowly corrode the currency.

Whoever has one option obeys.

Whoever has several options negotiates.

Every programmer understands backup. Back up your own life.

So why not leave?

Leave, if you want and can. There is nothing wrong with emigrating.

But do not treat it as a moral obligation. Many people have parents, siblings, children, friends, roots. Not everybody wants to raise children far from grandparents. Not everybody wants to transplant an entire life.

And there is a practical advantage: if you have foreign income, formalized, declared, and taxed correctly, and you spend in reais, Brazil can be cheap.

Services can be cheaper. Rent can be cheaper. Food can be cheaper. House cleaners, plumbers, dentists, restaurants, good schools outside the most expensive areas: many things become accessible if your income comes from outside.

Electronics and hardware are expensive because of taxes and imports. You solve that by buying abroad when it makes sense, within quotas, declaring and paying what is due.

Quality of life in Brazil can be very good if you have means.

That is the point: do not depend on politics to have means.

Competent people are gold

During your career, do not be the nerd who only delivers tasks and leaves.

Medium and large companies have finance, accounting, legal, sales, operations, HR, directors. Make friends outside your bubble.

In Brazil, it is very useful to know at least one good accountant and one good lawyer. Not to ask for the wrong kind of favor. To learn how to do things right.

The environment is hostile. Here and outside here. Those who accumulate knowledge, tools, and reliable relationships survive better.

That is survival of the fittest in the real sense: the best adapted survives, the one who adjusts to the environment, not the physically strongest.

Conclusion

Election is not a life plan.

You can follow politics if you want. Follow it as environmental risk, not as religion. Rain, drought, earthquake, inflation, exchange rate, taxes, new rules. You do not control the sky. You control whether you build a roof.

Stop waiting for some brilliant change in the near future.

Plan as if nothing will change for a long time.

Learn English. Earn in dollars if you can. Understand taxes. Structure assets legally. Protect your family. Make competent friends. Use Brazil in your favor, without believing in Brazil as a promise.

When you do that, elections become background noise.

And background noise does not run your life.

Four days ago, April 5th 2026, my blog turned 20. Yeah, I’m late on the anniversary post. There’s a reason, and that reason is what this piece is about.

I started in 2006 on Google’s Blogspot, like most people did back then. Later I migrated to a Rails 2.0 CMS that already existed, went through Typo3, and in 2012 I built my own engine from scratch on ActiveAdmin, which I dragged along from Rails 3 all the way to Rails 7. Only recently, in September 2025, I finally abandoned that custom engine and moved to Hugo with the Hextra theme, which is what this post is running on. Twenty years carrying the same posts across Textile, migrating from Less to Sass, trading Liquid for Markdown, and trimming obsolete junk along the way.

Two decades, five eras

Something few programmers stop to think about is how much the tech world changes in 20 years. I talked about this at length on Akitando #37 — The Dimension of Time. When I opened this blog in April 2006, I already had 10 years of experience behind me. I’d watched the dot-com bubble rise and blow up in 2000. And from that point on I saw a few more big ones: the rise of social networks (Orkut, Facebook, Twitter), the smartphone and mobile app revolution in 2008, the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin being born in 2009, the cloud and SaaS era, and now the generative AI era.

I watched those waves crash for real. Each one completely changed how we work and who survives professionally. This is the kind of thing you only see from a distance, after you’ve stacked up a few turns of the wheel.

My own career went through some violent pivots. I told the whole story on My First 5 Years (1990-1995), but the short version: I started in multimedia agencies, moved into enterprise consulting working on SAP, dropped all of it in 2006 to jump into Ruby on Rails and open source, spent a decade running events — mainly Rubyconf Brasil from 2007 to 2018 — then shut the conference down and started the Akitando YouTube channel, which grew past 500k subscribers. In the middle of all that there was the pandemic that rearranged everyone’s life. And since the beginning of 2025 I’ve turned into a full-time AI researcher and user, running models locally and breaking things with Claude Code until they work.

Checking the /en/tags/ai/ tag, I wrote 51 AI-related posts between 2025 and 2026 alone — 19 in 2025 and 32 more in 2026, which has barely started. Between 2018 and 2024, the blog was mostly the transcript archive for my Akitando videos. I’d record the video, transcribe it, dump it on the blog, and people would read it there. But once I started writing actively again, I noticed there was a loyal audience that never went anywhere, even through the quiet years. That feedback is what made me start The M.Akita Chronicles, a more personal series about the behind-the-scenes of recent projects.

The problem I never solved

For those 20 years, one thing kept nagging at me. Since everything was in Portuguese, it was inaccessible to anyone who didn’t read the language. I’d been getting messages for years from Brazilian readers living abroad (Portugal, US, Japan, Germany, Canada) asking for some English version they could share with their gringo coworkers. Stuff like “look, I’d show this piece to my team, but it’s only in Portuguese.”

I always said “one day I’ll translate it.” And I never did. Why? Because we’re talking hundreds of posts. I spent the last couple of days looking at the numbers: 727 Portuguese index.md files in the repo. Translating by hand, one by one, would take weeks if not months of dedicated work. I was never going to find the stamina for that. And every year that passed, more posts piled onto the queue.

The ironic part is that some blog posts were originally born in English. During 2017 and 2018 I had decided to write English-first, trying to reach an international audience. A whole interview series — the “chatting-with” ones with folks like Hal Fulton, Scott Hanselman, Chris Wanstrath (GitHub), Blaine Cook (former Twitter), Adam Jacob (Chef) — were born in English and stayed there. The missing piece was the reverse: take the Portuguese posts and translate them the other way.

The weekend that paid off 20 years of technical debt

This past Monday I opened Claude Code inside the blog directory. And asked it to translate everything to English. That was literally it.

It kicked off Monday, April 6th, around 6:30pm. I let it run. Went to sleep. Woke up Tuesday, it kept running. Slept again. Wednesday morning it was done. Counting from the first translation commit to the last, it was something like 39 hours of elapsed time. Not continuous, of course — there were nights, lunches, a coffee break or two. In practice, one long working weekend.

The result is sitting in the git repo, in commits anyone can inspect on the public blog repository. Scan the log and you can see the cadence: batch of 2008 QCon posts. Batch of 2009 RailsConf. Batch of 2011 Objective-C. All of 2012. The 2015 Elixir series. All of 2016, 2017, 2018. Batch after batch, organized by year and by series. More than 80 commits tagged i18n: or EN translation: between the night of the 6th and the morning of the 8th. By the time I’m writing this post, 354 index.en.md files are live against the 727 original index.md. Almost half the blog translated in one shot.

And look, ninety percent of it was smooth sailing. The translation came out good, natural, faithful to my voice in the original — I honestly didn’t expect it to work this well. Claude Code respects the tone of the source if you give it solid voice and style guidance, and it respects technical ideas without “correcting” anything you wrote. Worst case, you review a few paragraphs. Best case, you read the English version and it sounds like you wrote it directly in the other language.

A quick aside on the Claude side of the bill. I’m a Max 20x subscriber on Anthropic, which is the heavy-use tier built for people who hammer Claude Code all day. I’d never hit the ceiling of that plan before, not even in my most intense vibe coding sessions. This translation weekend was the first time I genuinely blew past the Max 20x limit and kept going into the “extra usage” mode (Anthropic charges on top when you go over the monthly plan ceiling).

For a sense of the damage, here’s my account dashboard this morning:

91% of the weekly “all models” quota burned through, already into the extra-usage mode, R$280.88 (about $50 USD) spent on top of the flat monthly subscription, and there’s still a good chunk of the cycle left. It tracks: read the full post, generate the translation, run the humanizer on it, repeat hundreds of times in a row. The token volume is massive. And today, while I’m writing this piece, Claude Code keeps hitting me with API Error: Request rejected (429) · Rate limited more and more often, which also tracks: probably some combo of my own plan quota topping out and Anthropic applying general backpressure, because I can’t be the only one going nuclear with the tool these days. Fine, whatever. That’s the price of using the tool hard when it actually mattered.

The other ten percent was a different story.

When commercial LLMs say “no”

Half a dozen older posts flat out refused to translate. Both Claude and GPT, through their APIs, would bounce with a 400 error and a content policy message. I tried multiple times, fresh sessions, clean context. Nothing.

The hypothesis is simple: those posts touched topics that automated content moderation flagged. A 2009 post about Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech (which mentions cancer — Jobs was talking about the terminal diagnosis he’d received). A couple of old Ayn Rand chapters I translated years ago about rights of man and argument by intimidation. An anti-Nazi post that ironically got blocked, probably just because the word “nazi” showed up, even though the context was critical. A post about the money speech from Atlas Shrugged. And a democracy-and-ethics essay that systematically broke every attempt.

The ironic part here is that the only way to get those posts translated was using an open source model. I loaded up Qwen 3.5 35B in llama-swap, running locally, no corporate policy filters. The model read them, understood the context, and translated everything without drama. It’s the same model I tested extensively in my last LLM benchmark, and which I rate as one of the best open source models available right now.

So yeah — a Chinese model translated posts that Western models refused. I can’t help finding this slightly hilarious. Oh, and of course, I’m not allowed to speak ill of China (sarcasm). Commercial LLMs will always have the corporate-policy-and-preemptive-censorship problem applied with a fairly thick ruler. It’s a real trade-off for anyone using them in production: you get fluency and reasoning power, you lose control the moment the topic brushes up against whatever the company decided is sensitive.

The reverse case: 2017-2018 translated back into Portuguese

While I was dialing in Claude Code to generate the English content, I figured I might as well solve the symmetric problem. The posts I had originally written in English during 2017 and 2018, plus the whole “chatting-with” interview series from 2008, were sitting there without a Portuguese version. Claude Code ran the reverse: read the English, wrote the Portuguese. So if you never read the English originals (since most of my audience is Brazilian anyway), now you have access too. Take a look at the Off-Topic section to see what showed up that’s new.

On top of that, Claude Code also updated my generate_index.rb script so it understands the blog’s bilingual structure and generates two separate indexes, one in Portuguese and one in English. The PT/EN toggle in each post’s footer shows up automatically whenever an index.en.md sibling exists. All nicely plugged into Hugo, using its native multilingual pattern.

The bigger point

Here’s the takeaway I wanted to leave in this anniversary post. Translation at scale, hundreds of articles, your content, in your voice, respecting the tone of the original, used to be an expensive and miserable problem. Now it’s a weekend problem. This is already live — you’re reading the result. The barrier that existed to reaching audiences outside Brazil became cheap enough that I don’t have an excuse anymore.

Alright, so let’s wrap the anniversary recap. 20 years. 727 Portuguese posts, built across five different eras of technology. 354 new English posts generated over a weekend. Half the blog is now bilingual. And the rest will follow. What’s missing is mostly old ActiveAdmin posts, Rails 2 stuff, and obsolete tips that honestly deserve to be deleted or left untranslated on purpose.

If you’ve got a gringo friend who’s tired of seeing you post Portuguese links and needs an excuse to send them something of mine — send it. The main AI posts, the Chronicles, benchmarks, rants, and a good chunk of the historical archive are already available in English at the same domain, just flip the toggle in the footer. Thank you to everyone who’s followed this blog for these twenty years. There are readers here who’ve known me since the Blogspot days. You know who you are.

Here’s to another year.

After the historical USD 10,000 break a day ago, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general finally reached the mainstream media in a bombastic way.

Like many in the tech industry, I tried the tech since the very beginning. I mined a couple of bitcoins myself back in 2009, then lost my wallet private key, totally forgot about it, and many years later here I am, kicking myself in the butt :-)

When it reached USD 3,000 I had my interest in the platform totally renewed. And it was a very pleasant surprise to see how big it became. If you follow me, you know how eager I am to learn new things that have real potential. And also how easily I turn my attention full gear into something.

I can only do that because I am not a loyalist to anything. I don’t pick and defend a single language, or a single OS, or a single manufacturer, or a single market. I find it very unproductive if I see myself just defending stuff.

Believe it or not, Cryptocurrencies are here to stay, for a few years at the very least. I remember the feeling when I tried the commercial Internet back in 1993. It feels like that all over again: an uncharted territory with a lot of potential and a lot of things we can’t even imagine right now.

If you follow me, you also know that I am a big proponent of applying Reason. I hate both extreme hype and FUD. Anyone sharing either is someone that wants to be noticed, free attention, but has nothing actually useful to say. “Oh, it’s gonna reach 100k soon! Buy in!” or “Oh, it’s a tulip bubble, you’re an idiot if you buy in!”. Both extremes are imbeciles.

Education is key to anything. The reasoning is the starting point.

As a big disclaimer: I am not recommending anyone to buy into cryptocurrencies without doing your own due diligence. Anyone doing any recommendations for or against is irresponsible. All I can do is convey a personal opinion and technical analysis. This is my role.

One example: did you know that the so often repeated Tulip Bubble never actually existed? Yes, that shows how quick people are to share memes and fake news without actually doing research.

And it’s even more hilarious in the tech industry, where I see many “evangelists” shouting about the “miracles” of starting your own tech startup in hopes of “disrupting” the industry with yet-another-Uber-derivative. Let’s put this straight: anything can be a bubble.

Gold is only valuable because we created a story around it. Gold can’t be eaten. Gold is not even a very good metal to work with. We just created a story and we agreed to it. The same goes for anything we consider “valuable”. What is a fiat currency? It’s a piece of paper, which is useless by itself. But if we all agree on the same story, that “$100” printed on it makes the paper super valuable.

Such is the power of belief.

Anything that we do requires some level of faith. If I perform a job to someone else, I need to have the faith that I will be paid in the future. The confidence comes from a piece of signed paper or even a simple e-mail, and the trust that institutions will help me enforce this payment if need be.

It’s all stories, faith, and beliefs. If you didn’t already, I highly recommend you read Yuval Harari’s “Homo Sapiens” to understand how stories shape our history.

That being said, I find it hilarious that techies considered “serious” are super quick to shout out “this is a scam!” or “this is a bubble!” without giving it 1 second of consideration, check the fundamentals and check the sources. Engineers should know better, and that exposes who actually know how to do proper analysis and who just follow herds blindly.

You can’t say that I was wrong if, for any reason, cryptocurrencies explode tomorrow all of a sudden. Nor that the naysayers were right. This is important: anything in the future is impossible to predict. You have to play the odds. If you don’t have confidence, don’t gamble. But creating stories to justify ignorance is beyond disappointing.

The interesting part about the financial markets is teaching people how to deal with improbability. I have been evangelizing Nassim Taleb in this blog for years, since the 2008/2009 economic collapse. We learned a lot. We learned about “Black Swans” and how to become “Antifragile” and, in good timing, how to have “Skin in the Game”. Engineers should have more of this knowledge, they would come up with much better solutions.

Answering some specific FUDs I have been reading:

“It’s a bubble!”

It may be. As I said, the tech industry is a bubble for all we know. It only requires a few VCs to collude and pull back and leave a bomb to explode behind. Everything is just stories, no matter how much you value something. That’s it.

How do you operate in a bubble? In an antifragile way. First of all, if you’re uninitiated, never, ever invest everything you have. Only invest an amount that, if you lose everything, you won’t be left to die. This is Investment-101.

Try to buy at the lows, and perhaps sell at the highs. Or plan long-term and HODL for a few years. If you need quick returns, learn how to deal with stop-loss orders, for example. Don’t try to outsmart the market if you don’t have trading experience. Or do, but don’t complain when you lose.

Losses or profits, it’s all on you and you alone, not “the market” or “the speculators”. Everybody is an adult. Adults should take responsibility for their own acts. If they lost money in a gamble they didn’t understand, it’s their fault.

“Mining consumes more energy than certain small countries!”

It doesn’t matter. First and foremost, they are not draining free energy. Every miner is paying for it. Now you will see why it’s so bad when governments interfere with free markets. If some country subsidizes the energy, then the supply and demand formula will fail. Obviously.

And techies should know this better. There never was enough bandwidth in ground telephone lines for everybody on the planet to connect to the internet. We had to evolve infrastructure, a lot. We had to add submarine lines. We had to go from dialed modems to ISDN, to cable modems, etc.

Proof of work based mining consumes a heck of a lot of energy, and for good reason. We are trading off energy for integrity. But this is not the only alternative. There are proof of stake implementations starting to be deployed in other alt-coins which are super energy efficient while providing similar levels of trust in the consensus.

The point is that technology evolves fast, you can’t extrapolate into the future based on what we have now. It’s like someone in 1993 saying “the commercial internet can’t happen because telephone lines are too slow if we ever want to have video streaming services”.

“Bitcoin is too centralized, it is too dangerous!”

If you’re a programmer and still don’t know exactly what mining means, I recommend you read my previous article about it first.

Mining is not deterministic. Even if you have the best hardware ever, it’s not guaranteed that you will mine the block first. It’s more like a raffle.

Which is why miners organize into pools, which share the gains between the members.

The concern is that 4 of the biggest pools, AntPool, ViaBTC, BTC.com, and BTC.TOP “control” 62% of the world’s hashpower..

It’s said that anyone controlling 51% of the hashpower could launch a hack attack against the blockchain, being able to rewrite blocks in the recent past and allowing double-spend, for example.

But in practice, it’s not that easy.

It is expensive to mine. USD 20,000 in equipment can only mine around USD 11 per day, without subtracting all the costs including the depreciation of the machines. Anything other than mining is very risky and unprofitable. The system is built in a way that hackers would have to spend so much money at such high risks that it’s easier to just follow the rules.

And again, the alt-coins and forks are experimenting into new ways to make it even harder in the future.

“Visa performs thousands of transactions per second. Bitcoin can never do that!”

Again, this is a useless argument. It’s like saying “gold can’t be exchanged fast enough, it will never be good”.

We already have several alt-coins such as Litecoin and others trying to solve the problem of fast transactions. Consider that all alt-coins are kind of tied to Bitcoin, the same as the dollar used to be tied to the gold. And if the so-called Lightning Network ever goes live, we can cross boundaries between blockchains more easily as well.

Visa doesn’t transact dollar “bills”, they make virtual transactions in their internal databases. Only when the merchant withdraws, it’s converted to fiat dollars.

You can easily add Bitcoin to the mix of options in a Visa transaction system. That’s how a credit card works today. You only pay 30 days later. And it works. What’s the matter?

And again, we will solve this in time. Let the technologies mature and demand starts to need it and the solution will come up.

“It doesn’t serve any social function.”

Most of the criticism against cryptocurrencies comes from the “elite” population in first world countries. If you’re a white person in the USA, with a good income in dollars or someone similar in Europe, with lots of Euro. You are mostly concerned with “Bitcoin is too slow for me to buy goods at the shopping mall” or “the transaction fees are too high for my daily Starbuck’s coffee”. And you start shouting that “Bitcoin serves no social function”.

But this is absurd. You don’t live in South America, Africa, Southeast Asia. You are not in Venezuela where their currency was broken by the current dictatorship. Can you imagine your beloved dollar bill worth less than toilet paper?

You don’t live in Zimbabwe where the army seized power. You don’t live in Asia, a place under constant threat of nuclear missiles on their heads coming from crazy dictator Kim Jong-Un.

So, yeah it doesn’t serve a social function in your daily sugar intake from 7-eleven. It’s too slow to buy 2 gallon super gulps and the fees are too high. But if you live anywhere in the world where the government poses a threat to their citizens, having an unregulated, decentralized, store of value, which you can easily take out of the offending country, is a life saver. Even in countries like mine, Brazil, you don’t want to have everything in Reais in case dictator-wannabes like Lula or Bolsonaro actually go crazy and coup.

“I don’t see it. I just don’t see it. And I don’t care.”

This is the most honest thing to say, at least it’s assuming your own ignorance and your own lack of interest.

And there is a good reason for that. In terms of tech, the USA follows what Silicon Valley says. And many other countries just keep repeating what comes from there. So techies are used to following what Google or Facebook or Apple are saying.

Now, the blockchain technology didn’t come from them directly. It’s not a Google product. And worse, it touches their fragile moral beliefs. They think it’s ok to receive huge amounts of VC money as a “reward” for what they “believe”, their “culture”, their arbitrary “values”. They don’t believe in making their own money. And even though VCs are from the financial market, techies despise Wall Street and the financials. The Starbuck’s hipsters hate the suit and tie traders and their so-called “dirty tactics” to make money.

It’s hilarious actually; in the end, they all want one thing, and one thing only: more money. But hipsters are very hypocritical when it comes to saying that. “I don’t want money, I want to disrupt the market”. Yeah, right, keep telling yourself that.

Now, consider that this whole cryptocurrency buzz is not coming from the West. It’s all from Asia. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China, they are the ones steering the market. Japan, as a country, has already regulated and accepted Bitcoin as proper currency and they have 60% of the market share, alone.

This is a heavily Asian driven phenomenon. And we are just getting started.

So this is not an “if it happens” scenario. It already did. Biggies like the CME Group, Nasdaq will start having Bitcoin offerings. We are lagging behind discussing stupid trivial issues that will be fixed in the long run.

Cryptocurrencies are here to stay. My recommendation if you are truly someone that values knowledge: learn about it.

By complete coincidence, this year I had the chance to appear on 3 podcast channels. I want to thank Paulo Silveira, Charles Max Wood, Lucas Caton, Fellipe Azambuja, and Ramon Sanches.

The first one actually came out late last year, in November, on Ruby Rogues with the topic “Ruby Conf Brazil and Building Communities” where Charles Wood and I talked a bit about the history of the Ruby community in Brazil — how I tried to get it started, what I attempted, the blog, talks, events. We also covered more specific points like a small overview of the Ruby language and my view on not limiting yourself to a single language or technology. If you’re new to the Ruby community, it might help give you an idea of how we got to where we are today.

The second one came out in February, on Paulo Silveira’s podcast Hipsters Ponto Tech, and the topic was “Carreira em Tecnologia”. The legendary Guilherme Silveira and Sérgio Lopes joined in, and in that conversation we touched on the main aspects for anyone starting a programming career. Take a look at the comments too, since several other points of view, opinions, and tips came in from listeners. Fun fact: this one was a bit of work because we recorded an earlier version, but since Paulo was still in the early days of the podcast, he refined the process and asked us to re-record the one that ended up being released. The format and topics changed a bit to be more focused, which made the conversation better. Some of the topics I covered in the first attempt I ended up revisiting in the podcasts later in this list.

The third came out in mid-May at the invitation of Lucas Caton, who introduced me to Montanha and Ramon from the podcast Dev na Estrada, and the topic was “Vale a pena? Ruby on Rails com Lucas Caton e Akita” where I again revisit some of the history of the international Ruby community and why Ruby on Rails is different from every other community, and why it’s still worth investing your time in this ecosystem.

The fourth came out at the end of May when Charles Wood invited me back to Ruby Rogues with the title “My Ruby Story”, but this time for me to tell a bit of my personal story. How I started my career. How I got into Ruby specifically. The historical context in the tech world over the past 20 years.

The fifth and most recent came out today, early June. I’m back again with Montanha from Dev na Estrada in an “Interview” to revisit some of the Ruby Rogues theme about the beginning of my career. But while on Ruby Rogues I move very quickly over the beginning and jump to the last 10 years where I focused more on Ruby, in this one with Montanha I focus much more on the very start of my career, particularly the 90s and a brush over 30 years ago up to 10 years ago. The earlier ones are long (about 1h each on average), but this one in particular is VERY long (almost 2h!) — apologies for the length. But Montanha started with “tell us from the beginning”… I tried to summarize and only mention a few points, but even so it ended up REALLY long!

Did anyone get to listen to any of the podcasts? What did you think? Leave your comments below.

“But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” - Don Draper

One of the great myths of modern society, perpetuated by a torturous daily repetition on social media, is the false “goal” of the “pursuit of happiness.”

On top of that comes the myth of “motivation”. TL;DR: motivation is overrated, far more than it actually deserves.

“People can have two different mindsets, she says. Those with a “fixed mindset” believe that their talents and abilities are carved in stone. Those with a “growth mindset” believe that their talents and abilities can be developed. Fixed mindsets see every encounter as a test of their worthiness. Growth mindsets see the same encounters as opportunities to improve.” - Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Then comes the repeated mantra of “do what you love.” As I discussed back in 2014, that idea is a petty way of devaluing other people’s work.

“…, the big problem with the ’love what you do’ narrative is that it’s tied to a discourse of happiness that means ‘being on top of the rollercoaster all the time.’ As if a normal, day-to-day, routine life couldn’t be a life of satisfaction. All of that makes this scenario worrying.” - Bárbara Castro - “5 Reasons why ‘do what you love’ isn’t the solution”

In our small big world of tech, this leads many people to conclude: “I’m going to work at a startup or start my own.” The decision by itself has nothing wrong with it. The problem is reaching it driven by the previous myths, which turns into a huge source of unnecessary frustration, as I already explained in 2013.

“I won’t mince words: I am deeply skeptical of this system. I’m skeptical of this system’s slavery, self-congratulatory fetishization of “disruption,” while at the same time becoming so obviously the kind of impassive institution it wants to replace. I’m skeptical of the short-term vision of the startup community. And I’m particularly skeptical of its disregard for the lives of the people who participate in it and the lives of those who live in the world that startups seek to reshape. Let’s not even start to discuss the collusion, cartelization, and other market corruption activities that are so common in the VC world. The point being: it’s a bad game, and a fraudulent game.” - Alex Payne

Add to that the social media “consensus” that the world never stops getting worse. Everything today is supposedly worse. People, worse. Jobs, worse. The environment, destroyed. Everything offends everyone all the time, and nobody can stop judging others.

I disagree, as I’ve explained back in 2013 and repeat every year: the world is better, constantly improving, and the future will be even better. I’d like to take this chance to honor one of the men who helped change my perspective on the world, the recently deceased Dr. Hans Rosling.

The Perpetuation of the Myths

There’s no shortage of books, talks, TV shows, movies, and everything else built around the idea that everyone “must” be happy, all the time. And that if you’re not happy, you’re doing something very wrong. The relentless pursuit of “ideal happiness” has become one of the most unhealthy and cruel obsessions of the past two centuries, right next to the excessive consumption of sugar. That’s another subject, though sugar and happiness do tend to be correlated.

There are 2 concepts everyone needs to understand:

1. You probably don’t have depression. These days everyone “is depressed,” of course, because “figuring out what you love to do” takes a lot of work and brings a lot of “suffering”…

No, you’re just bored, momentarily.

Saying “I’m depressed” instead of “I’m bored” has become so common that the real clinical condition needed another name to set itself apart, “Major Depressive Disorder”. That one is a medical condition, far too serious to be treated with such carelessness.

2. Normally, even after going through events we consider very bad, or very good, we tend to return to the same level of “happiness” (or boredom) we were at before them. This is called the “Hedonic Treadmill”. It’s the main reason the “pursuit of happiness” is such a cruel journey: whoever doesn’t grasp this mechanism lives frustrated all the time.

“When enough is not enough, a Hedonist is born.” - Sukant Ratnakar

Have you ever thought “I’ll finally be happy when I get married.” Or “if I get this job, I’ll feel completely satisfied.” Or maybe you relate more to the other side of the coin: “I’ll never be happy now that I got this medical diagnosis.” Or “I can’t be happy while I have to pay these debts.” Psychological research has revealed two important findings when it comes to these beliefs: The things we think will make us happy never make us happy for as long as we imagine. At the same time, negative life events and challenges don’t have a lasting impact on our happiness either, as we believe they would. - Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D - The Myths of Happiness

“We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not.” - Jennifer Hecht - The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn’t Working Today

Because of Hedonic Adaptation, any change seems to supply fresh “motivation,” the feeling that “we’ve finally locked onto the right path.” Unless it brings a new purpose, it’s just more of the same. We soon get used to the “new normal” and drift back to boredom.

Without understanding this, you stay stuck in the endless, unsatisfying cycle of “the grass is always greener on the other side.” The most twisted effect of these myths shows up when a person starts blaming others for their own problems. “I can’t because my husband…”, “I can’t because my family…”, “I can’t because my coworkers…”, “I can’t because my boss…”, “I can’t because society…”

At this point you’re lost. You want changes, but you want everything around you to change, except yourself. That’s the best definition of a coward: living on superficial justifications and excuses to avoid effort, to avoid pain, to maximize short-term pleasure. It’s the behavior of an addict, and judging everything and everyone is the drug.

Only you are destined for great things, but something or someone is holding you back. Only you are special. Only you deserve special treatment. In the old days we’d politely call this “immaturity” or “childishness.” Today I’d say most people actually fit into “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”.

“Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultraconfidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism … (this) causes problems in many areas of life, such as relationships, work, school or financial affairs. You may be generally unhappy and disappointed when you’re not given the special favors or admiration you believe you deserve. Others may not enjoy being around you, and you may find your relationships unfulfilling.” - Mayo Clinic

In the modern world, I’d reduce this to the “Like Culture.” Sad.

Conclusion

This relentless pursuit of “ideal happiness,” this “doing only what you love,” and this certainty that “the world is going to end” make people very weak. Low self-esteem, low empathy, sky-high narcissism, and a sense of “depression” that ends up paralyzing them. In the end, the person just lashes out in every direction, for lack of “purpose” and out of constant frustration with everything and everyone.

Fortunately, I never had this problem. I’ve known people who do, and this article is dedicated to them, as a “wake up call.” That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my unhappy moments and personal crises. I’ve lost a lot, financially and personally. Businesses, friends, relationships. I’m not exaggerating. But I accept my losses and I pay for them, as part of life: No Pain, No Gain.

A “fancy” work environment was never a concern. I once worked under a tarp (!) when they were painting the small office where I was an intern, in summer, with no air conditioning, because they were going to throw a party and the work couldn’t stop. I worked inside a logistics warehouse, with a zinc roof, only a fan, and trucks coming in and out right next to me.

I slept on the office floor dozens of times. I carried furniture down the middle of the street to move offices. I pulled many unpaid all-nighters. I got chewed out for things that weren’t even my responsibility (I was an intern). I did all kinds of things unrelated to my real job, fought with managers, with “coworkers,” with vendors.

I never treated any of this as “the end of the world.” It was just the inevitable. The famous “accept it, it hurts less.”

It’s no accident that I’m an Engineer. An engineer solves problems, and our obsession is always finding a more efficient way to do the same thing. No engineer ever solved anything just by whining.

There’s also no such thing as “work that devalues me.” If I have to crop a Photoshop, I won’t treat it as useless manual labor. There’s no useless work. There’s bad will. Any ordinary, underestimated task, done with your head engaged, can lead to great accidental discoveries.

“The inventor of the Coca-Cola wasn’t a shrewd businessman, a seller of sweets, or a dreamer looking to strike it rich in the beverage business. John Pemberton just wanted to cure headaches. A pharmacist by profession, Pemberton used two main ingredients in his hopeful headache cure: coca leaves and cola nuts. When his lab assistant accidentally mixed the two with carbonated water, the world’s first Coke was the result.” - 10 Awesome Accidental Discoveries

Many of these narcissists, in their aura of self-importance, believe they need the perfect environment, that someone must give them the conditions to achieve great things (emphasis on “give” because they refuse to earn what they need on their own). That’s a load of nonsense. I’ve yet to see anyone who thinks that way achieve anything relevant to anyone.

In my experience, all the great discoveries were born in humble conditions, with people who had a real interest in what they were doing. Only that. Professionals, “craftsmen,” interested in perfecting their own knowledge, who as a consequence came out with great things that benefited more people. You don’t plan something revolutionary. It happens by accident, given the ideal conditions of temperature and pressure at that moment.

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” - by Akita.

I am not a programmer with the goal of one day surpassing Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds. You can do good work without being blindly arrogant. 30 years in, I still have fun with trivial things: a new piece of code that compiles, a configuration that optimizes my GPU, setting up a Raspberry Pi, testing a new language, tweaking my text editor, researching, learning, evolving, and so on. “Doing what you love” is doing these small things well. And “being happy” is a process of trial and error, always in motion, something you win little by little rather than reach as a final destination.

Whoever enjoys the present, what exists around them and within their reach right now, instead of wasting time on “what if in the future…”, is the one with the best chance of doing what others can’t, blinded by the journey of impossible happiness. Constraints lead to Innovation, as I’ve been repeating for years.

“carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” - “Make the most of the (limited) time you have”.

“Whoever lives in the past is a museum. And whoever suffers over the distant future is mentally ill.” - Unknown.

Coincidentally, while I was researching for this post, the Hipsters Ponto Tech podcast came out where I made a small appearance precisely to talk about the topic of Careers in tech.

And reread my old posts mentioned above, related to these topics:

• The World Today Is Very Good! Happy 2013!
• Letter to a Young Programmer Considering a Startup
• Constraints are liberating: less is more
• Don’t Do What You (“THINK”) You Love

TL;DR: Learn how to learn, and make better use of your life.

“Creative” professionals (as if “creative” were restricted to painters and illustrators) have always been the most loyal Apple followers, for good reason. It was the cradle of essential tools like Photoshop, QuarkXPress, PostScript, PDF, and QuickTime. Apple set the standards for media creation, and anyone that was someone used those tools.

Microsoft focused on the corporate market, not on the creatives. Linux was still in its infancy, and most developers didn’t even know the difference between CMYK and RGB. They were content with a crude bitmap on the screen.

I have this theory that we took technology for granted in the late 90’s, thinking we were at the top of the world. That came from the Dotcom Bubble of the late 90’s, which burst together with 9/11. The depression made us waste the next 3 to 4 years trying to figure out what we would do next.

Apple had the luck to dodge the burst. They were already at the rock bottom since 1997. The cleaning up of their hardware lineup and the release of the iPod created their own small bubble. Steve Jobs was back and he brought good developers that made OS X a joy to use not only for creatives, but developers as well.

The Microsoft Antitrust case of 2000, the Dotcom Bubble burst in 2001, the release of the iPod in 2001, the switch from System 9 to OS X/BSD in 1999, the switch from PowerPC to Intel in 2005, the release of the ultra desirable Titanium PowerBook G4 in 2001. All of those contributed to give Apple the edge. And while everybody was down, it made them feel even larger than life.

Then in 2007/2008 they had a new push: the iPhone, the App Store, and the need to use Xcode, available only on Apple computers. Unlike being forced onto Windows because of Visual Studio, using Xcode was actually an extra reason to buy a Mac.

Linux distros were still struggling. Back then, we were stuck with the stupid X11. If a Linux-based OS was cutting edge, X11 on top of it was the worst of both worlds. Apple was smart enough not to adopt it and built Quartz from scratch, improving it with each new OS X release. It took five years to fully stabilize. Only now, in 2017, are we finally moving from X to Wayland/Weston.

Microsoft also struggled after Bill Gates handed the reins to Steve Ballmer. The road from XP to Windows 10 ran through the disasters of Vista, Windows 8, and Windows Mobile, plus the endless attempts to revive the dominant but defunct Internet Explorer, the largest Walking Dead ever in technology. The Ballmer era was a disaster.

Then the iPad got released and Steve Jobs died.

Apple is stuck in 2010.

And so are we.

Major Linux distros, Microsoft, PC hardware manufacturers, big industry turnarounds (Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola) the dawn of the GPU era, the end of Moore’s Law speed clock wars into parallel computing, the dawn of ARM. It took 10 years for all the smoke to finally settle, and it took having Apple standing still for 6 years for everybody to finally catch up.

Ballmer left the reins to Satya Nadella. Microsoft acquired Xamarin, made huge strides into open source, and even Ubuntu now runs natively on top of Windows 10.

And the Asians. Samsung, LG, Huawei, the South Koreans and the Chinese all forced the North Americans to push harder.

One last legacy of the Steve Jobs era was both killing Adobe Flash (finally!) and pushing HTML 5 technologies forward, an acceleration of 10 years in 5. It was because of the iPhone that we have the Web as it is.

Google jumped in, took over the ball that Internet Explorer left behind. WebKit became the quintessential web browser reference. Javascript became the new application platform, pushed by the many evolving Social Networks.

For better or worse, the social networks forced the new dawn of complex and interactive Web Applications. We got the example of Gmail and Web 2.0 and with the new mobile environment, everything converged into making cross-platform, ubiquitous apps.

It’s now easier than ever to switch between desktop OSes because we made it easy to jump around between the desktop and mobile devices already.

Why is it easy now to move between macOS or Windows or Linux distros? Or between macOS and iOS, or between Linux and Android? Because most of the software is in “the cloud”. Linux dominates the Cloud world that Amazon debuted in 2006 with S3 and EC2, now closely followed by Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure and other smaller competitors.

Because there is at least a good Chrome browser in every platform.

Because the apps we use are mostly web enabled: Gmail, Spotify, Slack, Hangout, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon. The other half are all available natively under iOS or Android: Whatsapp, Waze, Swarm, Snapchat, Instagram.

10 years ago, with the release of the iPhone, the technology industry finally started to put their shit together.

It was a cat and mouse chase until at least 5 years ago, then everybody started to settle.

After Jobs died we still had expectations that Apple would keep pushing forward, albeit at a slower pace without Jobs’ whip.

It didn’t happen. They made bad decision after bad decision and we keep feeling that we are back in the early 90’s, under Scully, Spindler or Amelio.

But now, there are fallbacks readily available: Windows 10 Anniversary Edition is finally a competent Windows, bringing back the glory days of the mid-90’s. And major Linux distros are cohesive, requiring little to no nerdy tweaking into obscure config files, pushed by Canonical, for better or worse.

And most of the apps we use in our routines are available. Heck, you can find a good web-based cross platform text editor in the form of Atom nowadays.

Apple also left the legacy of ubiquitous cross platform compilation readily available in the form of LLVM (in Portuguese). It served their own needs to have Objective-C available on PowerPC, Intel, ARM and Apple Ax processors. But LLVM is now the best backbone to enable languages such as Rust, RubyMotion, Crystal to exist and easily create fast binaries on multiple platforms.

“Apple’s current board of directors need to go”. “Tim Cook needs to step down”. I am sure many are crying out loud like this, but there is no Steve Jobs waiting to return. Apple is so big that the inertia alone will keep them going a few more years, but they are in danger of falling into irrelevance.

Other industries such as energy, health, genetics, are evolving in their own ways, but computer technology is in a dangerous standstill.

Computer Languages stopped evolving in the mid-90’s. All “new” languages are amalgams of language features that were already there since the 70’s and 80’s. CPU processors are stuck into just making transistors smaller and more energy efficient. And we are already there: $9 computers are good enough for trivial tasks such as web browsing. So much that we are putting them everywhere: even a bluetooth toothbrush that keeps track of your brushing sessions.

Did you see CES 2017 products? Pillows and beds that track your sleep and sync data to an app. Washing machines. Vacuum cleaners. Fitness devices. Health devices. Personal assistants such as Alexa. Everything takes data from you and syncs it into “the cloud”.

“The cloud” has also peaked. It’s ubiquitous, accessible, and downright cheap. Technology in general is dirt cheap nowadays.

Wearables and VR are good gimmicks, but even if they become ubiquitous, they stay just an extension of the use cases that the iPhone revolution bootstrapped.

Mobile, wearables, and social networks only made people more anxious. Giving everyone a “voice” online didn’t improve things, it just raised the overall anxiety. Opinions are in such large supply that they are worth less and less.

Every person online is now a source of terabytes of useless information to generate pseudo-statistics that are useless for the most part. Every person is now defined by a bunch of data in the cloud.

I have no idea where we go from here. As a witness of history, I have to say I miss the excitement of exploring new frontiers. We had it from the mid-90’s onward. We took a small break after the Dotcom burst, then got it back full blown in 2004. We lost it after 2010.

2010 has been the longest year I’ve ever seen. Maybe settling down is a good thing. Who knows?

I might not understand Portuguese, but I'm fluent in Douglas Adams. Congrats @AkitaOnRails and thank you! #RubyConfBR pic.twitter.com/hfOA2wMKot

— Kären Engelbrecht (@scriberty) September 24, 2016

To be crystal clear, this is not one of those “leaving Ruby” dramas. Because I don’t believe in BS like that.

I am a Rubyist and I will always be a Rubyist. For the foreseeable future Ruby will remain my primary, favorite language.

And there is no other drama involved, by the way. Rubyconf Brazil is primarily sponsored and organized by Locaweb, and I have nothing but gratitude for their relentless support through all these years. I even owe them an apology, as I made the announcement without anyone knowing. I don’t know if they will want to continue with the brand or not, we still didn’t talk about it.

The Conference Principles

About the event, some things people may not know:

I don’t own the conference.

I don’t have any contract with any sponsor. I don’t have a salary, profit-sharing (the conference was always non-profit, Locaweb itself paid premium and always spared no expense, which is why quality was always top-notch), or any other kind of financial arrangement. I’ve been organizing the conference in my own time.

That was by design, a principle.

I tried to guarantee as much fair game as possible. Which is also why I always limited my own speaking at my own event. The only times I did speak were to fill in a gap (a speaker who couldn’t make it at the last minute) or at very specific moments (at the 1st Rails Summits, or the 10th anniversary of Ruby on Rails in 2014).

My main concern with the conference has always been the program curation. I handpicked talks by technical merit, as much as I could. They always reflected what I personally think is worth watching. That’s why I always avoided public voting (as it unbalances towards celebrities), never a committee (as it forces politics), no blind choosing (as I believe a conference program is like storytelling and I wanted coherency).

As we were not profit-oriented, I never worried about lame things such as choosing topics just for the sake of increasing audience. It doesn’t mean I always chose right, mistakes happen, but they were the exception. For the most part I believe I did the best I could.

It was always what I personally believed made sense for the audience. I am very proud of the speakers we were able to foster, and equally proud of the audience that followed them. If you look at Rubyconf Brazil’s registered attendees, most of them don’t attend any of the other big events in the country. It’s an exclusive group of people that meet once a year.

More than that: every year, in the last 10 years, half of the attendees were new to the conference, and more than half come from all over the country (not just from Sao Paulo City).

RejectConf 2007

My very first “official” event was called RejectConf SP, in 2007. It had around 150 registrations and less than 100 people actually attended. Almost all of the speakers are still around and doing very well.

It was named like that because in 2007, Ruby was the ugly duckling, especially in Brazil. No one in their right minds would ever think how big this community would become. So it was the rejected language.

The ugly duckling ended up being a Black Swan.

The next 2 years I didn’t try to make a “Ruby"Conf, because most people didn’t even know what “Ruby” was, but everybody was aware of “Rails” as there was a period of “Rails-bashing” in all the other communities. So I called my next events “Rails Summit”.

Once we were able to make the Ruby name sink in and be better appreciated, that’s when I made the switch to “Rubyconf Brazil” in 2010.

So 2016 was the 7th Rubyconf Brazil, but the 10th Ruby-related event in a row.

Then, Ruby on Rails reached the milestone of 10 years, in 2014. I made the closing keynote explaining why it still matters.

Most importantly I made the following important point:

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” ― Steven Weinberg

The False Dilemma of Language Religions

If you’ve been paying attention to everything I do, you will know that I am not an extremist language/platform evangelist. I don’t believe in language religions. I believe in freedom. Freedom to do and say whatever I want (to the limit of not harming others, of course), and most importantly: without prejudice.

But this is increasingly difficult, as it automatically sounds “weird” when a “rubyist” wants to talk about Go, Clojure, or other languages. It always feels like “hey, this rubyist is talking about Clojure, he is switching, therefore Ruby is losing ground”. And for that matter it always sounded strange when someone heard about an evangelist of one language speaking about another.

This is the bullshit of this generation. I witnessed my freedom being restrained, year after year. Everybody else’s, for that matter. Everybody must be under some flag nowadays, having an extreme, black-and-white position.

This is just stupid.

Most extreme positions, meant to feel like a solid choice, end up being a very ambiguous and demagogic position.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. ― Carl Sagan

I’ve been writing about Critical Thinking, the Scientific Method and related topics for many years on my blog and social media.

I’ve been putting non-Ruby topics in a “Ruby"Conf for many years. We had Node.js in 2010, iOS in 2011, Elixir was introduced by José Valim in 2012’s RubyConf. And in 2015 I did yet another big change by introducing 3 parallel tracks (out of 5) dedicated to non-Ruby topics.

This year we put all language logos (Elixir, Crystal, Go, Javascript, Clojure) in the Rubyconf Brazil materials.

No rubyist felt that was strange, and this is what I am most proud of in the audience we built: Rubyists in Brazil already find it super natural to talk and use other languages and platforms without feeling like they are “betraying” a cause or without feeling the need to “abandon” Ruby because they started enjoying something else such as Elixir or Clojure.

Rubyists, in Brazil at least, are less prone to fall for the mistake of vanity metrics such as choosing a language because of the TIOBE ranking.

There was one last thing I had to do: set the final example.

For most people Fabio Akita (a.k.a. AkitaOnRails) is synonymous with Ruby. Even though I write a lot about other things and have done so for many years, most people will still associate me with RubyConf Brazil. And even though the conference changed its direction years ago, “Ruby"Conf is mostly associated with “just Ruby”.

It was just too comfortable to keep going with Rubyconf Brazil as it was. I know how to do it. People like it. It’s still pretty much growing without signs of slowing down (we started having to close registration a couple of weeks before because of overbooking).

When things start to get too comfortable you know it’s possibly not entirely right.

I am not my favorite language.

This was the final message, the story I wanted to tell, and it was 10 years in the making.

I spent 10 years building a healthy audience that is unlike any other in the technology world: a highly agnostic, rational, critical-thinking-aware, results-oriented crowd. We really believe in “best-of-breed” and “best-tools-for-the-job”.

But it couldn’t be just small talk, demagogic speech. And the most uncomfortable thing I could do was to let it go.

The message was loud and clear: I am not my language, and you shouldn’t let yourself be either.

Akita"OnRails”

Many people asked if I will change my username.

Nope, it will still be “AkitaOnRails”.

Since the very beginning, “On Rails” is not about the web framework “Ruby on Rails”. It means exactly what it says: “On Rails”, “Over a Line”, “Embracing Constraints”.

“Constraints are Liberating”

• DHH

Ruby on Rails is a web framework. But it is also a statement, an opinionated point of view.

It means:

• Making efforts to write Beautiful Code
• Making efforts to write Enjoyable Code
• Making efforts to write Maintainable Code

It means using the best techniques and practices to achieve that. Test-Driven Development (Test-First, or Test-After, it doesn’t matter). Continuous Integration. YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It). SOLID (as Bob Martin evangelizes). Continuous Delivery. Etc.

The Ruby Community didn’t invent Git, but we made it work through Github.

The Ruby Community was the very first software development crowd to adopt Agile techniques as a whole, and not as a dissident faction of another mainstream group.

Now every new community aspires to be “On Rails”, without naming it like that. And not by just copying the web framework. Just by the desire and discipline of writing “Good Code”, and never “Quick and Dirty” Code.

And these values will keep on going, with or without a Rubyconf or the Ruby language.

I know, for most people it will still feel like I am tied to the web framework, but it’s not. Maybe someday I will change it, but not now.

We will not always agree on what the right techniques are, but we will always make efforts toward the same goals: writing beautiful code that yields valuable results.

The Next 10 Years

With all that said, I hope to have helped a bit in spreading the word:

Stop being extremists.

Exercise critical thinking. Do what feels right, not what pleases random influential groups. Never force your point of view upon others. Stop blindly following false prophets.

I do everything by this idea:

“I never live for the sake of another person and I never ask anyone to live for the sake of mine. I only accept voluntary trade for mutual benefit.”

“I am a software engineer. I know what is to come from the principle on which it is built.”

I explained this in detail in my article "_Why, Ruby Dramas, and Dynamiting Courtlandt”. In a small way, I want to think that I honored this principle.

I write software (and about software) because I enjoy software. I am very fond of Ruby and will keep doing the best Ruby I can for many years. And I will also write good Elixir, and good Crystal, and perhaps good Javascript, etc.

But I will do it my way, not anyone else’s.

And so should you.

In times when everyone seems to have an active opinion on certain subjects, I prefer not to actively voice any, neither for nor against. Both sides are absolutely sure they’re right, it’s a zero-sum game, and I hate zero-sum games.

If I have an opinion and force it on people, many will agree and buy my point of view. Plenty of others will hatefully disagree and try to discredit the idea or its author. And the main thing: we all only stand to lose if we enter this kind of Manichean view.

Does this mean staying “on the fence”? Not that either. One thing I’ve had for years on my Quora profile is this:

“I never live for the sake of another person and I never ask anyone to live for the sake of mine. I only accept voluntary trade for mutual benefit.”

So, before continuing, I sincerely ask that you think for yourself, not for others, much less for me, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with what I have to say.

That said, I want to start with a small example, of microscopic magnitude next to today’s big questions.

“Welcome”

On July 7, 2016, at 1:52:39, it will be 10 years since I started publishing posts dedicated to the tech community, particularly to Ruby on Rails. I chose my words carefully and said the following:

Let’s see how far this community can go.

Ruby on Rails could be a lot or nothing, it’ll all depend on how the market faces this novelty. But a lot can be done now. To start with, by learning about the subject.

I’ll post the main topics about the platform here and I hope everyone collaborates with ideas and suggestions or even criticism and opinions.

Unfortunately there are still many challenges to overcome. To start, Rails materials in Portuguese are virtually nonexistent. Brazilian sites likewise. So when I say “starting from zero,” I mean it.

The biggest challenge will be convincing the market. And that doesn’t happen overnight. It means it still won’t be possible to set the Java legacy entirely aside. Let’s start a transition period in which we’ll try both things in parallel.

Pioneers always walk through arduous territory, but the reward for the first ones is also always greater. That’s the meaning of investment.

My Principles

If you’ve never read my Off-Topic posts, let’s make it clear: I’m not altruistic, in the literal sense of the word, not in the wrong way it usually gets interpreted. Nothing I’ve done up to today was purely for some kind of “greater good” ideology.

My objective is simple: I just want the right to produce, on my own terms.

Along the way, what I do leaves side effects, and one of them is helping others. Today I have a small company called Codeminer 42 that employs more than 60 people. People with families, who find there their livelihood and their own self-improvement, through the results my friends and I seek and achieve together. That’s a direct side effect.

I organize Rubyconf Brazil, and have for 9 years alongside Locaweb. Speakers, sponsors, Locaweb, and me have an annual meeting point where companies meet new people to hire, professionals find their next job, and entrepreneurs come together to test ideas. It’s over 1,200 attendees every year with a chance to produce something. That’s an indirect side effect.

A group like Ruby on Rails Brazil on Facebook, which I didn’t create, has more than 8,500 participants exchanging ideas, learnings, and experiences.

The foundation of all this is the open source world: the biggest capitalist experiment in software and a living example of what a Laissez-faire Free Market is. It’s the best place to maintain and improve technology commodities.

Companies invest time and money hiring programmers to maintain open projects. Not because they’re “nice,” whatever they say, but because these technologies bring direct and indirect benefits to their businesses.

On their own, they’d have to invest far more than by dividing the problem among dozens of other companies so everyone profits together. It’s the ideal platform for an individual to demonstrate their abilities to the world, sharpen them, and look for new opportunities. And it’s one of the most brutal and aggressive environments there is, which is exactly what makes it good, for learning to deal with pressure, communication, and creative technical solutions, precisely because resources are finite.

Everyone profits, and not always in money: some with new learning, others with new opportunities. Even the person whose profit is the pure satisfaction of helping is making a fair trade, of what they know how to produce for the reward of a clearer conscience. After all, nobody helps people they dislike, and that would be real altruism.

What I Did NOT Do, and Do NOT Do

When I started this journey, and remember I wasn’t the first, I always sought to do things for my own benefit, knowing it could benefit other people too. With mutual benefits, everyone moves faster and better. My proposition was never a promise of material or moral reward, only the promise of working on what you love.

If it had been purely for morality or ideology, it would never have worked. And if it somehow had, it would be fragile, because it would sit on the wrong foundation.

If I had truly believed that “Ruby on Rails is the only best technology,” I would have forced that view on others. Many would have believed it. Worse: we’d have to assume the other technologies are bad and fight them, ignoring the evidence. The result would have been disastrous.

I always knew Rails is good in certain cases, particularly in the startup market that was growing from 2004 onward. Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service. A lot of people thought like me, independently, and from there gems like Github were born, the largest free software market ever created.

If I had assumed my way was right and everyone else’s automatically wrong, I would have gotten frustrated and failed bitterly. My natural thought would have been:

“Why don’t these people follow me if my path is certainly the right one?”

I never tried to convince anyone that my point of view is correct “for the good” of something, or “because it’s free software,” or “because it serves some political vision.” I always evangelized by teaching how to profit.

In a niche with the characteristics of Rails, professionals of rare quality accumulated. Every new programmer had those pioneers as “role models.” Every Rubyist aimed for quality first. And the new generation of startups showed how to make profitable products without the open faucet of insane investors like in 2000. That was 37signals’ pitch in 2005: everyone wanted to build the next Basecamp. And they did, from Engine Yard to Heroku, Github, Pivotal Labs, Living Social, Shopify, Twitter, Groupon, Zendesk, Hulu, Square, Airbnb, and Soundcloud.

Does it matter that they aren’t 100% pure Ruby? Of course not. Nobody is defending an extremist, religious view, this isn’t the “Cult of Ruby.” Rails is a means to an end, never the end. Whoever adopted Rails wanted to filter the best programmers, because you had to really love the craft of programming to learn Rails in 2006. They also wanted quality of life in the daily routine, because the principles behind the design of Ruby and Rails created a unique view of how to make software. Nobody chose Rails the way you pick a soccer team or a political party. Everyone who chose it was after some gain for themselves and, thinking that way, built a gigantic ecosystem that ended up benefiting many more people.

What I didn’t do? I made no promises, gave no certificates, guaranteed no positions, promised no “bright future,” and put no political vision into the community. Maybe the only promise was a lot of work ahead and opportunities to produce. Reread the last paragraph of my first post:

“Pioneers always walk through arduous territory, but the reward for the first ones is also always greater. That’s the meaning of investment.”

That’s the spirit of an entrepreneur: risking what they own, not what others have.

It’s intentional: from the beginning I rarely speak at the events I organize myself. And from the beginning there are other technologies on display at a Ruby event (we had Node.js talks back in 2009, before JavaScript events existed). That’s why “Ruby"conf has tracks for several other rising technologies: because we only stand to profit from it.

It’s my way of producing on my own terms, with what I love.

The “Ruby way” doesn’t convince others that using Ruby is the only path. It shows that walking the harder path, the one of quality and of caring about what you do, probably brings better results. It’s what an entrepreneur does: takes calculated risks and works brutally for themselves. It’s what an artist does, always different from the common.

The path of an entrepreneur, an artist, someone who produces, is necessarily individualistic. Because it goes against the status quo, against what’s considered “right” today, against what’s “commonly accepted” by a “majority.”

“Insanity is wanting different results doing the same thing over and over.” - Albert Einstein

We’ll always be stoned for it. But it’s precisely the people who choose the different path that everyone tries to stop, and it’s they who brought us the great achievements of humanity. One of the things that made me see this right away came from the creator of Rails, the still controversial David Heinemeier Hansson, someone I agree and disagree with on several fronts, when he cited early in the community:

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.” - Mahatma Gandhi

It’s a sin to even imagine that it isn’t the Sun that revolves around the Earth. It took the individualistic and absolutely “selfish” vision of a “Galileo vs Inquisition” to open the way to today, when we’ve not only already gone to the Moon but are getting exceptionally good at sending machinery into space.

A Nazi Nation

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” - Obi-Wan Kenobi

There’s a term for those who think in absolutes in the real world: extremist terrorists. Being extremist, by itself, does no harm. The problem is forcing the extreme view on others, the terrorist’s turf, and that’s what leads to the dark side of the Force.

A terrorist is dangerous because they believe, absolutely, that they’re right.

“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” - Alfred, The Dark Knight

That’s why you don’t negotiate with a terrorist. It’s impossible, you’ll always lose.

And the worst part is that the dark side of the Force seduces, because it easily disguises itself as something “good”:

“Don’t lecture me, Obi-Wan! I see through the lies of the Jedi. I do not fear the dark side as you do. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security … to my new Empire!” - Anakin Skywalker, Episode III

It isn’t hard to understand how people emerged who are so unequivocally recognized as “evil.” Collectivists and extremists like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring.

But they’re just a few people. The main question is much harder: how do you convince an entire Nation, like the German people, to accept and act in favor of the ideology of a party like the National Socialist one, to the point of the genocide of 11 million people in the Holocaust!?

There are many theories for what happened during World War II, and it’s a delicate topic to this day. I have a small personal theory, with no support in evidence, hence this ‘disclaimer’:

Many must have committed those acts with purely evil intent. Even so, it’s hard to believe that in a short span of time, thousands of Germans automatically turned into agents of Evil.

At that time, Germany carried the post-WWI humiliation and an economy in tatters after the Great Depression of 1929. In that context, a populist political ideology, in the name of the social good of the nation, gained strength through the National Socialist Party. The idea of the “Third Reich” seduced by bringing back the hope of a bright future, that of a “New Germany.”

And they found someone to really hate, in this case the Jews. The anti-Semitic idea gained traction in the populist speech.

In the name of the “bright future of the New Germany,” the path could reach all the way to the extreme of the Holocaust. And even so, how is that justified?

If you don’t know Stanley Milgram’s psychological theories, I recommend watching the film The Experimenter (2015) to understand.

In short, Milgram’s Authority Experiment, repeated countless times over the years, shows it isn’t as hard as common sense imagines to make a group of people do the wrong thing, even while aware of it, in the name of a “greater good.”

I’m being simplistic in the explanation, of course, but it’s worth keeping this in mind: most people react with herd behavior.

It’s close to the Law of Least Effort: after all, why spend time researching whether something is “right” or “wrong” when it’s much easier to follow what the “majority” thinks is right?

“A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing”

The most dangerous thing of all is rarely complete ignorance. It’s “a little knowledge,” as the great poet Alexander Pope warned us.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.” - Alexander Pope

One of the things I like to write about is precisely this warning: we don’t know everything, we’ll never know everything, and everything we know may be wrong. If you live with this always in mind, you’ll be safe.

The Root of All Evil, the Enemies of Reason, is what I’ve been pointing at for a long time: “religious” thinking.

And I don’t say that to attack others’ religions. The “religion” I refer to isn’t only Christianity, Judaism, Shintoism. It’s worse, it’s the Religion of Little Knowledge.

We see examples of this every day, just read the news:

• Classic Paulista football matches will have a single fan group after fights and an elderly man’s death
• Chinese man sentenced to death for selling more than 150,000 secret documents
• Criminalization of abortion exposes women to death across all social classes, study shows
• To vaccinate or not to vaccinate children, that is the question
• Daughters of Australian scientists who took their own lives reflect on their parents’ plan

Just search for “death” in the news and a good part of it is the result of ignorance or, worse, of people’s “little knowledge.” This won’t solve itself, but we’ve already solved thousands of these problems. The 20th century onward was a great advance in eliminating prejudices, outdated knowledge, and the general ignorance of the global population.

The problem is that none of these people have any doubt. They’re all sure they’re right and that they’re doing the morally correct thing, given the little they know.

The consequence is dogmatization. And a dogma is unquestionable. Do you follow an unquestionable script? Then you’ve probably already been dogmatized. Nobody likes being proven wrong, even less after believing a lie with great dedication for a long time, because it becomes part of their identity. And who wants to see their own identity broken?

Black Swans and the Antidote of Little Knowledge

Finally we get to the point. How do you solve the world’s problems?

With “scientific philosophy.” And you don’t need to be a scientist to think this way.

The world is unfair, that’s a fact. It’s impossible to solve everyone’s problem all at once. But you can solve one problem at a time, over time. Sorry to the impatient.

I think it starts with something simple: critical reasoning that doesn’t lean on simple induction.

For me, Karl Popper taught me one of the most valuable things in my way of thinking. I don’t look for false-gurus, false-experts, false-leaders, false-heroes, or false-icons.

I don’t need anyone with “authority” to tell me what’s right. And I don’t need the consensus of some “majority” to validate my actions either.

When someone advocates an “inviolable affirmation,” “the” right way, whether by tradition, by scriptures, by the will of an abstract and amorphous entity like “society” or “the people,” or worse, by “inviolable proofs,” I know I’m looking at a false prophet.

The explanation for becoming incorruptible is simple. Let me use the classic example:

“Imagine that all the swans in the world are white.”

Let’s say your statement comes from the fact that in the 40 years you’ve lived, you, your family, and your friends only saw white swans with your own eyes. Your natural and “logical” conclusion, by “induction,” is to extrapolate to a general, absolute law: “all the swans in the world are white.”

That comes from your little knowledge. It doesn’t matter if it’s been 40 years. It doesn’t matter that you’ve seen 1,000 swans in your life, all white.

You clearly never traveled to Australia or New Zealand, where you’d find the black variety.

By your “little knowledge,” you reached a wrong conclusion. And, worse, you extrapolated and uttered that statement to others, who now think like you. The responsibility is yours.

“I know vaccines are bad because I heard cases of several children who were vaccinated and died, so I’ll never vaccinate my children.”

“I know medicines don’t work but homeopathy works, because my aunts have been using it for years and never had health problems, so I’ll never use medicines.”

“I know capitalism is something for evil people, because I knew businessmen in my city who exploited my friends and neighbors, so the capitalist system has to fall.”

“I know socialism works, because my friends who visited Cuba were very impressed with what they heard about the hospitals there, and so I think it should be used everywhere.”

You do this every day: you see news with a catchy headline, see dozens of “Likes,” agree that it’s right, and still share it with more people, spreading lies.

“A lie repeated a thousand times becomes truth.” - Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

The problem is the “search for the truth.” Apart from mathematical theorems, you can rarely show the correct proof of anything. Often we resort to the reverse, showing something is incorrect. No amount of evidence proves a theory as absolute truth. The most we can do is “disprove” a theory, and for that a single piece of evidence that refutes it is enough.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

And I’ll add: not even with extraordinary evidence can we claim the discovery of an “absolute truth.” We can only say we have knowledge solid enough to use, and that can be disproven at any moment.

It’s worth keeping this concept in mind, because it makes us stronger against rumors, pseudo-science, superstitions, “common sayings,” outdated tradition, and every kind of false “truth.”

Any theory that offers no clear ways to disprove it is a weak theory and certainly isn’t scientific. Any statement that depends on a divinity impossible to prove, on an inviolable “morality,” or on an “unquestionable” authority is pseudo-science and is wrong.

The Gray Morality of “Social Justice Warriors”

This is a topic I avoid getting involved in as much as possible, because this generation of so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) is particularly perverse. Not all of them! Just a small, very influential minority. True wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Disclaimer: do I consider those who fight for social causes perverse? NO. There are several legitimate social initiatives, with excellent results and with people genuinely committed to solving a legitimate problem. I wish only good things for them. Here I’m talking only about those who devalue them. The objective of this section is to separate the real from the illegitimate.

I’m not against social causes, and most civilized people aren’t either. There’s a lot to do to keep improving the world. And in the last century we improved it in extraordinary ways, even more so compared to the centuries before the 20th.

Contrary to what many say, and something I’ve been repeating since 2013: “The World Today Is Better”. Believe the world is getting worse and you’ll start justifying perverse acts as morally correct.

The credit goes to the continuous progress of people who “produce,” not to specific events and movements. And stealing goes beyond taking a material good from someone. You can steal much more than that: a person’s time, morality, mind, and freedom.

Theft of freedom is Slavery.

Until the 19th century everyone had to work hard just to secure their basic livelihood. Today we have a huge surplus, because we discovered more efficient ways and applied them for individual purposes. That ended up helping far beyond the individual who created them. The steam engine, electricity, agriculture, medicine, all creations of selfish people whose only objective is to produce, made the world orders of magnitude better. No social revolution in history can claim the same results.

Do you care about reducing poverty? Milton Friedman already explained why the Free Market is better for the poor.

There are only 3 basic freedoms that really matter:

1. the right to freedom of expression;
2. the right to produce and keep for oneself what one produces via voluntary trades, without theft or slavery;
3. the right to seek and achieve one’s own goals, without obligation to serve the will of others.

A “selfish” productive individual has a single objective, to produce, to create. Never to steal.

No one has the right to restrict the freedom of another person by forcing their own gray morality, their own agenda, and their own objectives, except by the means of “voluntary trades.” No gray morality has the right to justify the immorality of enslaving an individual, for any objective whatsoever.

And here’s the problem: the false social justice warrior has a single objective, to be a social justice warrior, to have the acceptance and validation of others. For that, they need someone else’s suffering to exist, anyone’s, to justify their existence and their identity. Ending the suffering is not their objective. If one form of suffering ends, soon another will be needed to raise a cause, and that’s the vicious cycle. Their objective is to feed off others’ suffering, to enslave that suffering to the validation of their own identity.

A producer, a creator, isn’t always interested in “causes,” and that’s certainly no rule. Whatever their motives, they want to create, and that’s enough. For the false warrior, that isn’t enough: they need to take from those who produce for the benefit of some “cause.” The warrior wants to take what you have, and not what they themselves have, because they don’t produce, in the name of some gray morality. And only for the causes that interest them. It’s the old and eternal fight between those who produce and those who take, the gray morality of Robin Hood.

It’s a shame, because it devalues those who genuinely dedicate their lives to social causes. Doctors, firefighters, police, soldiers, and the many anonymous people who don’t spend their time posting on social media, judging others and stirring up discord, but who work silently, expecting no public recognition.

Want to tell a real social warrior from the social parasites? Look for the absence of any pursuit of recognition.

Conclusion

The objective of this long article? Just to lay out universal concepts and my personal principles, which are inviolable and incorruptible. The main points:

• The only really moral thing is voluntary trades. Never forcing the slavery, physical or moral, of any individual.
• There is no “truth” decreed by a group or a majority. There are ideas, some valid, others invalid. But if they aren’t falsifiable, refutable, they’re probably false by premise, no matter the apparent morality they represent or the amount of “evidence” they gather.
• There is no “moral authority,” that’s the realm of charlatans. Doubt anyone who forces your property (your action is your property, your freedom is your property) in the name of any “cause,” no matter how just it seems. Don’t look for heroes.
• The only thing that took us out of the Middle Ages and launched us into modernity was the minds that produced for their own benefit, without unilaterally demanding the taking of anyone’s property, material or mental.

Look at the 20th century and compare it to the 19th and earlier. No one explained this better than Hans Rosling, of Gapminder:

Don’t become a victim of the minority of false social justice warriors. Learn more about this dangerous Orwellian group, nothing less than the “Thought Police” prophesied in the despotic universe of 1984. This kind of thinking is nothing new, it existed throughout the 20th century, but the advent of the Internet and above all Social Networks created a wild environment where rumors, fake news, and pseudo-science in general reign. It’s where Critical Rationalism can save you.

Inviolable and incorruptible principles are simple. In the axiomatic world of mathematics, 2 + 2 is 4, and there’s no “majority” or group that, by clamor or vote, can change that result to 5 or 6, no matter the morality or authority of whoever makes the clamor. You don’t need validation! You do need to take responsibility for your own actions and stop justifying your mistakes as the result of following someone else’s gray morality.

Repeating:

“I never live for the sake of another person and I never ask anyone to live for the sake of mine. I only accept voluntary trade for mutual benefit.”

And with this principle we’ll keep evolving the 21st century as we did the 20th, no matter who tries to steal from us, whether you agree with this exposition or not.

We’re already doing it.

"Do what you love"/"Follow your passion" is dangerous advice and can destroy your career.

Another recognized celebrity in the US is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who, in 2012, said the same thing:

"Don't follow your passion, follow your effort."

Apparently, the famous Confucius was the first to say the phrase that would become one of the biggest clichés for young people coming out of adolescence and having to face adult life with real responsibilities:

"Do what you love and the money will follow."

By the way, Confucius is kind of a generic for everything: don’t know who said it? Say it’s from Confucius. (And the usual disclaimer: just because I quoted people doesn’t mean I agree with them or with everything they say; they’re mere references!)

Besides Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, several others have raised the subject before, and I recommend you read “Don’t do what you love.” by cartoonist Rachel Nabors, where she concludes with a new phrase:

"Just don't do what you hate."

On the renowned site Slate, Miya Tokumitsu also wrote “In the Name of Love” where she begins with the excellent subtitle to the article:

Elites embrace the "do what you love" mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers.

I have to say I was even a little surprised that this subject is also in Brazil. In March 2014, Daniela Carasco wrote the article “5 reasons why ‘do what you love’ is not the solution,” published by EXAME.com, talking about Bárbara Castro, a sociologist specialized in work issues and professor of the sociopsychology course at the Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo (FESPSP). And she also already identified the obvious that many still remain blind to:

According to her, the big problem with the "love what you do" narrative is that it's tied to a discourse of happiness that means "being at the top of the rollercoaster all the time." As if a normal, day-to-day, routine life couldn't be a life of satisfaction. All of this makes this scenario worrying.

Finally, blogger Dani Arrais analyzed the subject in February 2014 in her post “THE TRAP OF ‘DO WHAT YOU LOVE’”, who coincidentally is also a friend of the same sociologist Bárbara Castro (something tells me I should try to meet her), and she says:

Do we need to be happy all the time with the work we do? Even if we love what we do? Can't we suffer with the contradictions that this work imposes on us? Why can't we admit that it doesn't make sense? Who does this interest?

You may be confused reading all this. I imagine the vast majority of my readers have always identified with the “Do what you love” mantra. After all, if you’re on a blog that talks about Ruby and, with less emphasis, technology in general and Entrepreneurship, it’s probably because you “love” the subjects of Ruby, Technology or Entrepreneurship.

And you probably read what I post because you assume that I’m “passionate” about these subjects. And here comes the important part:

• I don’t love Ruby or programming
• I don’t love entrepreneuring or owning a company
• I don’t love technology or the equipment I buy
• I don’t love writing or the time I spend on it

And to be honest, over the years, because of this so-often-repeated mantra, so many brainwashing attempts, a few times I almost succumbed and believed in this idea, but fortunately I always managed to bring myself back. And I have no problem saying that I don’t love any of these things.

But if that’s the case, you might want to ask me:

• Why so much effort writing so much about these subjects? (1000 posts!)
• Why so much effort working in programming? (almost 20 years!)
• Why so much effort organizing events? (7 Rubyconf Brazil!)
• Why so much effort traveling the country to evangelize these subjects? (more than 100 talks!)
• Why so much effort creating a company? (6 years in consulting, 3 years in my own!)

I’ll try to answer at the end. And there’s nothing wrong with what you think you like, love, or are passionate about. The idea of the article isn’t to say why that’s “wrong”; it’s just the way the phrase is used that I want to explore within my own personal context.

First of all, don’t follow advice blindly. The first time I understood this concept consciously was watching the famous viral video from the beginning of the century, Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen, where one of the parts says:

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.

Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it's worth.

That said, I don’t want to advise you on what to do, but I want to explain a few points that may go unnoticed.

First, the Obvious.

First of all, if you think “Do what you love,” you’re actually thinking “Do ONLY what you love.”

• “I don’t love waking up early”
• “I don’t love obeying orders”
• “I don’t love sitting in traffic”

And this list will grow, because there are millions of things we need to do but obviously don’t “love.” Deep down, the most generic would be: “I don’t like doing anything (working).” I just don’t know how that derives into the other great cliché of our times:

"I'll become my own boss to follow my own passions and not someone else's dream."

The irony is that if someone believes this, they’re already following the dream of whoever made that phrase for the first time. You’re already living someone else’s dream, whether you want to or not. Think about it.

Phrases like that naturally lead to other self-help fallacies. One of the most famous would certainly be the dreadful and dangerous “The Secret”, whose definition is as follows (according to Wikipedia):

The Secret states that the law of attraction is a natural law that determines the complete order of the universe and our personal lives through the process of “like attracts like.” The author claims that the way we think and feel, a matching frequency is sent to the universe and that attracts back events and circumstances of the same frequency. (…) and if you think positively, you’ll attract positive events and circumstances. The proponents claim that desirable results like health, wealth, and happiness can be attracted by changing your thoughts and feelings.

The idea of “doing what you love” is unequivocally linked with “thinking positive to attract positive,” even though, rationally, trying things like “dropping everything to pursue what you love” has the same odds of working out as winning the lottery. And whoever thinks this way should look at the child in the photo below and tell them:

"You certainly aren't thinking positive enough."

Exaggeration? Not so much, it’s the same result: you believed an idea blindly, without thinking about it. We do this every day, and I know it takes a conscious, big effort not to be a victim of it. I myself almost believed these ideas before.

Hold what you want to troll in the comments right now: I’m not saying that thinking positive is wrong, that pursuing your dreams is wrong, or that doing what you like is wrong! Follow to the end.

Second, What Do You Love?

What’s the difference between Passion and Love? And what is Passion? And what is Love?

These are questions humanity has already spent millennia exploring and will have to explore for more millennia. How many poems, literature, songs, paintings, sculptures, speeches, revolutions have already happened because of Passion and Love? This post on a mere blog will not be where you find an answer, and this author doesn’t even presume to imagine he knows the answer.

But for the sake of continuing this text, I like this brief summary:

• Love is a state of way of life, while passion is a state of being.
• Passion lasts for a short time, but Love lasts longer.
• In Love, deep understanding is the essence, while passion doesn’t require it.

Reread the phrase “Do what you Love,” or similar ones like “Follow your passion.”

You are passionate about or love many things at the same time. And this changes over time. You rarely find something or someone you’ll love forever (and you’ll only know it close to your death).

ONLY following something that changes all the time is a race without purpose. And the only guaranteed result is that you’ll get frustrated in a worse way.

But does that mean we should ignore our passions? Of course not. I’m just saying that thinking your life should be filled only with what you’re passionate about, ignoring the rest of the world, is an absolutely childish stance.

It’s like any child excited about the Nintendo 64, who goes days without bathing, without sleeping, without talking to anyone, without wanting to go to school, because they’re deeply passionate about it. And, as we all know, most get bored in a few days. Weeks later, the so-passionate object of desire is in a corner of the closet gathering dust, and the child is already looking for what to love next, every children’s day, birthday, and Christmas.

Doing “ONLY” what you “THINK” you “LOVE” (note the emphases in this phrase) means simply ignoring the real world. Ignoring brushing your teeth, ignoring going to school, ignoring working, ignoring responsibilities, which is what every adult would call “still being a child.”

Third, What Do I Love?

Talking this way sounds like another cliché: that an adult is a child who has set their passions aside. That’s perhaps where the later evolution comes from, with 30-year-old “adults” still trying to be the same children they once were.

This usually means being irresponsible, egocentric, and anti-social, since the so-called “adult world” demands responsibility, collaboration, interaction, and commitments. No one “loves” that kind of thing, no one loves “negotiating middle ground.” Every child wants all or nothing.

If you’re a reader who has followed me for the last 8 years, up to this post 1001 (which my friends have affectionately pre-nicknamed as the “Bombril post, of 1,001 uses”), maybe you have an idea of what I want to say now.

And here comes a disclaimer: don’t quote me as saying this is the solution or the answer. What I’m about to say is absolutely personal.

I do indeed pursue some of my “passions.” Like every human being, I get passionate very easily about a lot of things. It means I also get frustrated a lot, all the time. I’m human: cut me and I bleed. And much of what I like is superfluous, and the difference is perhaps that I’ve long understood that they’re superfluous. That is, I make mistakes, trip, fall, all the time, and I learn how to get up every time.

I’m passionate about technology, programming, methods, processes. And at the same time they frustrate me, upset me, leave me frustrated, leave me irritated and wanting to throw it all away. As every passion always is.

I’m passionate about communication, sociology, people, sharing knowledge, whether writing or speaking. And again, this leaves me tired, stressed, frustrated when I’m not understood, upset when people assume things without asking, but again, it’s how a passion should be.

But as I said at the beginning, I don’t Love any of these things. They aren’t my “life goals” or definitions of my identity or any philosophical thing of that kind. They are things I like, that I pursue, that bring me both pleasure and suffering at the same time, and that are means to another end, which isn’t to make me “happy” (in the sense of being comfortable in the short term, as it is for everyone).

Being happy all the time is the realm of LSD addicts. Have you ever seen someone who is honestly happy 100% of the time? That’s impossible. And thinking your work should be your greatest passion will only bring as a result a state of misery and frustration that’s the realm of psychologists and psychiatrists, the realm of tranquilizers and antidepressants.

(By the way, if I were neurotic, I’d almost conclude that self-help phrases like the one discussed here are a Psychiatrists’ Conspiracy to generate more Depressives. #troll)

No one should ever be “comfortable” or “happy” 100% of the time. Passions, Love, Happiness are always a dynamic balance between things that satisfy you and things that don’t satisfy you. You can’t have Light without Darkness existing. You can’t have satiety without hunger existing. You can’t have warmth without cold existing.

Another derived phrase is “Love what you do,” but that’s an exaggeration. I think of it another way that I think my mother told me for the first time and that is true:

"It doesn't matter what you're doing, but since you're doing it, do the best you can."

Confucius didn’t only say the phrase that gives origin to this post. Perhaps you remember Confucianism and that the ancient Easterners may have already defined this better: Yin and Yang, the concept of how opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how one gives rise to the other. Yin and Yang can be seen as complementary rather than opposite, interacting in a dynamic system where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Without ever having suffered, how is it possible to know what happiness is?

My Conclusion

In the end, Ruby, programming, technology, projects, entrepreneurship, talks, blog, and all of this are just means that don’t define what I really like and always liked: learning and improving myself, purely.

If you’ve at least once heard of Agile, Lean, Kanban, Toyota (recurring themes on this blog), you’ll remember the Japanese concept of Kaizen (改善) or “continuous improvement.” For me it’s something conscious. I remember as a kid seeing a very simple thing in an allegory: how does a ninja jump so high and even over a tree (in cartoons)? Simple: he starts by jumping a little bush on the ground, then a small shrub, and so on.

Perfection isn’t an achievable goal; continuous improvement is the infinite process for an unreachable goal. And what I love is the challenge of improving one aspect at a time in each of the capabilities I have today (programming, communicating, teaching, producing).

My foundation is that I’m passionate about producing, and everything I produce is nothing more than a draft of the knowledge I have today, and always worse than I can produce tomorrow. My only, true “passion” is the certainty that I will never really be “good” and that I am today a little better than I was yesterday. That’s all. It doesn’t matter now whether I’m doing a programming project or writing this post or if tomorrow I decide to paint paintings.

Learning means I don’t like easy things. Anything that everyone says is hard, boring, that they would never do, or that they can’t do, naturally attracts me. Because I like to solve problems, which is one of the best ways to test what I know. Doing what everyone already knows gives me no pleasure.

In particular I like producing something that is useful to someone. Whether it’s a post or a talk that helped someone learn something, or a work opportunity someone can use for their own goals, or a project a client can use to reach their goals.

Deep down, I have the impression that if I could summarize it, I love and am passionate not about the “what” I do but the “how” I do it. Especially when there are obstacles in what would be the “ideal how” and how I can solve that problem to reach the “what.” The “what” isn’t the part that interests me most.

The phrase “Do what you love” is always taken as “Do ‘only’ what you love,” and what I wanted to summarize was: “Don’t do ‘only’ what you ’think’ you love.” That’s all.

My only inviolable principle is to live through voluntary exchanges for mutual benefit. That’s why nothing I say is absolute and inviolable truth, but rather teachings on how to think, how to counter-argue, how to be conscious, how to be an individual who doesn’t live by others’ clichés. I don’t want blind followers in the same way that I don’t want and don’t need charismatic idols to follow.

I hope this can be my legacy.

If you read my mini City Guide from last year you’re probably already acquainted with the geography of the place. It’s always important to be aware of your surroundings when you’re in a foreign land.

Now you’re here, you don’t have a lot of time to randomly explore. And that would not be efficient anyway because São Paulo is humongous in size. I’ve lived here all my life, almost 4 decades, and I haven’t explored everything yet.

But if you’re near a Subway station (Metro) you’re in luck as many of the staples of the city are at walking distance from the many stations or not far by taxi from one of them. So let me pinpoint a few must-go places.

For the Feijoada you will go to Bolinha and for great barbecue you will choose Vento Haragano or Fogo de Chão. Unfortunately none of them are within walking distance of Paulista Ave, but they are close by taxi and I recommend you take one. They are definitely not on the cheap side, but if you’re here, you should try our best.

Another staple of São Paulo: its intense night life. You will want to try it at least once. After sunset, all kinds of tribes spread around the city. If you’re staying on Paulista Ave, you’re already next to some of those places: Augusta St.

At Augusta and nearby streets such as Bela Cintra, you will find Beco 203 if you like disco, rock, some alternative bands and indie music. FunHouse, if you’re young, as the crowd is just above teenager age. D-Edge is a 3 story high warehouse with great decoration, rock and international DJs. Lab Club for pop and electronic, and enjoy the molecular drinks.

If you’re looking for the popular Brazilian country music, Sertanejo, try Villa Country and Wood’s. Now, if you want something more VIP, go to Club A or Pink Elephant. If you like GLS parties, you want to go to The Week, Bubu Lounge or A Lôca.

Just don’t party too hard on the conference days :-)

So, you did party hard. Now it’s time to fix your hangover. And for that, I recommend you go to Bella Paulista which is a 24-hour super bakery with everything you need, from bread, to sandwiches, soups, and everything to calm you down.

If you’re more on the intellectual side, you’re also in luck, because MASP - The São Paulo Art Museum is right around the corner, together with Casa das Rosas, for literature and poetry, and finally Itaú Cultural, a reference in terms of culture and research, with many expositions you can visit, do check it out.

There are theaters around but unfortunately you would need to understand Brazilian Portuguese to appreciate them, such as Comedians Comedy Club.

Now, you can go to Old Downtown to appreciate some of the classics. First stop is very early in the morning at Metro São Bento. From there you can reach Mercado Municipal, our humongous central market, to try fresh ingredients, spices, and everything a high-end, high-quality, one-of-a-kind market has to offer. Definitely visit it if you can, try the sandwiches and other food there. You can learn a lot about the culture of any place by visiting its central market.

Then, go to Metro Estação da Luz, from there you can go visit Museu da Língua Portuguesa. It’s the only museum in the world dedicated entirely to a language. This will enlighten you a lot about our Portuguese language. And right next to it you can go to Pinacoteca to enjoy some more great art.

If you’re into history, go to Metro Ipiranga and get a bus or taxi to the Parque da Independência and at the same place the Museu Paulista. Unfortunately, as of now, the museum is closed for restoration, so check their website for updates.

If you’re staying during the weekend, I recommend going to Metro Liberdade on Sunday. Liberdade is the Asian neighborhood of São Paulo. Some may be surprised that it’s smaller than you might think given how well known the place is. The main places are near the Metro and Galvão Bueno Ave. There are several Japanese restaurants, stores that sell Japanese ingredients and foods and on Sunday they have an outdoor fair. Quite hidden around there you can also find the Busshinji Temple and the Museu Histórico da Imigração Japonesa, the museum about the century-old immigration of Japanese to Brazil.

Now, if you’re into being healthy, going to relax in a park is another great option. Again, right next to Paulista Ave, you will find Parque Trianon. But of course, the staple of the city is Parque do Ibirapuera. You can go to Metro Vila Mariana and get a bus or taxi to the park. It’s huge, although just half the size of New York’s Central Park. But you will find museums, expositions and other activities around, it also rents bikes so you can have a ride inside the park if you want.

To wrap it up, night is approaching, the sun is setting, so you will go to Metro Vila Madalena which is the traditional region for bars and bohemians. Bar Astor, Boteco São Bento, Bar Filial. Particularly you want to go straight to Aspicuelta Street where you will find many of the great bars next to each other such as Melograno Bar, Mercearia São Pedro, Salve Jorge, São Cristóvão.

There are several places I didn’t even attempt to mention such as Memorial da América Latina, Berrini, Cidade Jardim, Edifício Itália, Museu do Teatro Municipal, Edifício Matarazzo, Pateo do Colegio, Espaço Cultural Catarse, Centro Cultural Fiesp, Instituto Cervantes, Teatro Eva Herz, Galeria Vermelho, Mosteiro de São Bento, 25 de Março and so many more places.

If you’re staying at least 2 weeks you can attempt to go to more places. São Paulo is also known for its dozens of malls, they are literally everywhere and easy to find as everybody knows where they are. But the items in this list are not so well known even for people who live here, so they’re interesting to visit.

Do you have any other questions? Leave a comment below. And if you’re from São Paulo and want to add more tips, also leave a comment below.

In 2007 I wrote two articles on “consultancies,” A Vent and A Vent II. They’re worth a read to understand the context. I like to reread my stuff to see whether I’d still write the same thing today.

The first is a set of tips for a consultant to improve themselves. In the second I describe the greatest sin of a consultancy. I wrote both when I already had a few years at companies in different industries, the most recent being several years at a consultancy.

The first article is very simple, and what I recommended back then is what I still recommend today: continuous improvement. Two points from the original text:

It's no use just changing jobs, for two reasons: a new project won't necessarily bring new things (the chances of being just another form are high). And leaving learning only for when you need it, on a project, is already too late. You'll be overtaken by others who know what you should have already known. It's a good programmer's obligation to know things before, not after: after a terrible quality product goes into production, the result will be bad both for your client and for your reputation.

Stop complaining. Complaining creates a negative mentality, irritates others, and doesn't lead to any solution. Complaining is just another excuse, a noise that hides the real problem. The problem is this: you're complaining about the job, about the project, about the boss, but in reality you'd like to be complaining about yourself. Complaining is just the externalization of the frustration of being what you are and not being able to be more. And that's not a physical inability, it's just mental laziness.

For me, the great advantage of working at a consultancy instead of staying at a single company? It’s being exposed to different projects, different companies, different people, and different ways of dealing with each type of problem.

Look at it this way: a consultant is seen as a “pariah.” A company’s employee, in particular, has no reason to like a consultant, because they’re usually called in to do the employee’s job, in less time, with better quality, and earning more. In practice, if the consultant succeeds it’s because the employees were doing a terrible job before. It’s not always like that, but that’s the general view.

From the consultant’s point of view, it’s a hard job. They have to step into a context the employee had months to absorb, figure out what needs to be done and why it hasn’t been, and produce more than everyone else with less authority and less knowledge. A consultant is effectively a mercenary: we’re called in for the work nobody else could pull off.

Note: anticipating the freedom to interpret the “mercenary” metaphor, let me clarify I mean “the one called in to solve the problem no one else could” and not “being paid to do whatever they’re asked, including the wrong thing.” With the metaphor clarified, let’s move on.

That’s what I like. And that’s why a good consultant can’t regress to the standard-employee mind, the same way a mercenary doesn’t compare themselves to the private soldier: they need to be the soldier and the general. When I was a consultant, what pleased me most was being aware of this position, walking into a client knowing I’d have to solve the problems the insiders wouldn’t.

It was feeling the pressure of walking the front line without knowing what I’d face in the middle of the jungle. Talking to the subordinates, to their bosses, to the surrounding departments, and mapping the terrain to find the best path through the minefields. Being able to disagree directly with the client and, at the same time, offer a better solution than anyone had thought of. That’s the exercise of every good consultant.

The second article, A Vent II, revolves around a problem I’ve seen at many small and medium consultancies: poor financial health. That’s “The” main problem:

When a consultancy shows signs of financial problems, it's the red signal: jump out as soon as possible. Don't think twice. If the client decides to throw a tantrum, if the client decides to delay the invoice, if the client decides to stall, none of that is the consultant's problem: that's exactly what we pay this insurance to the consultancy for — so that it places itself between the client and you. The consultant, correctly working the hours billed, has the right to receive on the dates in the relevant contracts.

A large consultancy, with an established name for at least a decade, can get a sale price (rate to the client) up to 5 times higher than the buy price (rate to the consultant), or more. But that’s the exception in most of the market. In my case, the maximum is 50% of the buy rate, and almost 2/3 of gross revenue goes to payroll.

That’s the reality of the services market. With a tight margin, not counting other operational costs and investments, commercial and financial control is fundamental. You know a consultancy is competent when you’ve never had to complain about your payment, in a sector where clients never pay on time.

There are several advantages to working alongside a good consultancy instead of going it alone as an autonomous worker or freelancer, and being paid on the right dates is one of the main ones. If payment comes in unstable, or turns into a stiff, the freelancer option gets attractive again. So when I decided to start my consultancy, this was one of the main concerns. The rule I never broke: everyone gets what’s in the contract, on the stipulated dates.

And after more than 1 year, one of the most unstable periods in a services company, that rule held intact.

But that’s not all a good consultancy offers. The word “consultancy” is a big umbrella, unfortunately distorted by misuse. I split the definition into at least three big niches.

The first is agencies. Here the consultancy is about marketing and advertising, at most, and the software part usually carries low value in the total budget, sometimes handed over more as a “freebie.” Execution is low quality because the pieces are volatile, temporary, and don’t need to last long. Anything different from that, done in agency style, rarely works well.

The second niche is the infamous software factories. In them, most people work as pure “procedural executors,” never quite reaching “consultant.” The fundamental trait is missing: direct contact between the programmer and the client.

The executor works inside a defined process, receives work orders, clocks a fixed number of hours, and their only task is to deliver what’s already been detailed, in fixed roles. There are variations, but in general the factory is driven by a process that tries to be deterministic. For that, the kinds of software tend to be limited: forms, registration screens, and form flows, especially company intranets or integrations with back office.

The third niche, “consultancies,” where “consultants” actually exist, is rare. The assumption is that the kind of professional at a consultancy is superior to the one at an agency or a factory.

To understand this niche, we need to see what the disadvantage of being a freelancer is. A freelancer has to be a mini-consultancy: doing their own personal marketing, cultivating relationships and a commercial network, negotiating rates, scopes, and deadlines, closing contracts (and most close them verbally, because they don’t know how contracts work), issuing invoices, billing, and so on. Oh, and in the middle of all that they still have to program.

Their compensation tends to be higher because of that overhead, but it’s precisely because of it that productivity and quality tend to drop. And when the overhead isn’t handled well, the result is low-trust deals closed verbally, the way you should never do it.

A good consultancy removes that overhead and does it in a superior way. It’s a service exchange, my ideal concept of “voluntary exchanges for mutual benefit”. The alternative to being at a consultancy is acting as a freelancer or becoming an employee at a company whose core business isn’t necessarily software. And here’s a parenthetical: even at a tech startup, I’d say the core business is rarely the software itself, reflect on that.

“Services” is a free market where exchanges are essentially voluntary: service in exchange for compensation, as it should be.

There are companies where software is the core business, like software consultancies. And others where it isn’t, like commerce companies, where software is accessory and not the main business. Or hosting companies, where the core is unquestionably infrastructure and operations.

That’s another thing I learned as a consultant: identifying the core business. If a company sees software as “profit,” that’s where it invests, that’s where the future is. If it sees software as “cost,” it tends not to invest, and to swap what it has for cheaper alternatives.

And that makes sense. Why invest in software at a company whose core is sales? Or finance? There, software and programmers are cost, like a Word or Excel license. If the goal is to grow professionally, look for companies where software is part of the core. If you want a quiet job, routine and few activities, accepting the invisible risk of going obsolete fast and being subject to cuts, look for companies where the core isn’t software.

Back to the difference with a freelancer: the consultant doesn’t have to worry about marketing, contract negotiation, legal, billing, cash flow, or HR. Like a good mercenary, they get a mission and carry it out. More than that, the consultancy closes projects that would never be within a freelancer’s reach, and offers a delivery security a freelancer can’t provide.

A good consultancy also doesn’t end the contract with the consultant just because a project wrapped up. That’s another freelancer pain point: when a project ends, a sales cycle begins that usually drags. A good project takes 1 to 2 months of negotiation to sign, from first contact through proposals and adjustments. The consultant doesn’t carry that weight; they just deliver with consistency and quality, while the consultancy handles the overhead of keeping a healthy pipeline of projects always coming in.

Now, the key point: “like a mercenary.” That’s the most undefined part of the model. I believe a good consultant doesn’t need an “operational boss,” the traditional “manager” who defines work orders, takes over communication with the client, does the internal politicking, and tells each “employee” what to do.

Of course there are senior and junior consultants, and juniors will always mirror and learn from the seniors, but that doesn’t make them “bosses.” A good consultant is like a good mercenary: either they know what needs to be done, or they figure out how to do it, the right way.

“Autonomy” is the buzzword everyone learned to repeat like a cuckoo clock. Everyone only remembers the “freedom” part of the word, and conveniently forgets the “responsibility” part.

“Oh, but I am responsible.” You aren’t. Your name isn’t on the company’s articles of incorporation. If the company takes a loss, goes under, or has to deal with its own debts, the one who pays is the partner, not the hired consultant. Legally, you’re never responsible, until you become a partner.

And that’s a real possibility for whoever turns into an excellent senior. At my company it exists, and it was recently exercised with the entry of 2 new partners.

If the consultancy gives you the “freedom” to run a project the way a consultant needs to, no intermediaries, no operational boss, no short leash, it’s because there’s far greater trust than any company would give an employee. If something goes wrong, the consultant has zero risk and the consultancy bears 100% of it.

That’s another crucial factor some don’t get. It’s like insurance: would you drive a new car with no coverage? The consultancy is the consultant’s insurance. There they train on projects where they technically have no “responsibility” and still gain knowledge, capability, and networking, at zero risk.

That’s what I liked most about the consultancy where I worked between 2002 and 2007. I came in as a junior programmer, practically a trainee, even though I already had at least 5 years of prior experience. It was all new, so it meant taking a few steps back to learn. And I learned.

On some projects the challenge was purely technical, building software on platforms, tools, or languages I’d never used. On others, it was coordinating the work with colleagues the best way possible. On others, it was talking to the client to find out what they needed and executing the best solution. In the end, the challenge turned into selling, convincing the client of the right solution.

I never held the title of “manager,” “pre-sales,” or “architect,” but I acted in all those roles, switching from project to project as the situation demanded. At one moment I was the only developer assigned for a short stretch to solve a technical problem nobody could. At another, I was the one putting together a team of 10 people, hiring and coordinating. In all of them I did what I knew I should do: solve problems. A consultant who creates problems has stopped being a consultant and become just another employee.

A consultant’s compensation is also different from an employee’s. Part of why employees grow more slowly is that their pay rises almost automatically, nearly independent of individual performance. Even the best-equipped companies, with formal reviews and all, end up at the mercy of the ones who, instead of working toward growth, work to find holes in the system and do less. Public-servant profile, pejoratively: automatic annual raises, scheduled title changes, a bad environment for anyone chasing growth.

A consultant, like a freelancer, grows by performance, by delivery, and by how much the clients themselves recognize they deserve more. I’ve seen plenty of excellent consultants who, on switching consultancies, took the client along because of their exceptional performance. Today I don’t see that anymore, just unethical ex-employees trying to negotiate with the consultancy’s client on the side, in talk only. And what good client falls for the sales pitch of an ex-employee who clearly doesn’t deliver results?

The biggest problem at a consultancy is when the consultant regresses to the standard-employee stage. The symptom: instead of chasing results, they chase excuses not to do the work as they should.

There’s a big difference between the one who complains and keeps delivering good, consistent results, which is what they committed to when signing the service contract with the consultancy, and the one who complains and delivers less and less at lower quality, already going against what was agreed when hired.

The clearest sign shows up in “unionization” movements (in quotes, pejoratively, because unionizing in a market that isn’t monopolized or cartelized makes no sense). It’s the one who produces little and starts stirring up the people around them to create “movements,” smoke screens to pull attention away from themselves. It’s the one who spreads slander, insult, and defamation about colleagues, clients, and the company they work for. Easy to spot: it’s always the one who wants to “speak for you, for the good of the group.”

Exactly because of this, every consultancy has a turnover rate higher than that of ordinary companies, and it needs to. It’s the sector’s dilemma: a services company holds its intellectual capital in its people. Letting go of an employee, much less a consultant, means losing an important asset of work and relationships.

That’s why, when a services company lets someone go, it’s a conscious decision, aimed at admitting a hiring mistake and taking a step back to take two forward right after. Part of this I described in the article Net Negative Producing Programmer.

The only dismissal that actually harms a company is the one that happens after there are already signs of financial weakness, in the form of delayed salaries. Either way, not everyone was born or wants to be a “consultant,” and some only find that out over time. It’s all a matter of perspective.

To start with, a good consultant speaks for themselves and doesn’t need intermediaries. And they should know that everyone knows everyone in this market, where reputation and credibility are currency. Just think: what company would hire someone who defames the places they passed through?

Sometimes the consultant doesn’t understand the advantages of their own position. More autonomy always comes with more responsibility, and more responsibility always brings more challenges and more difficulty. Everyone asks for “more challenges,” but few take them on when they show up and say “let me handle it.”

Many look for a job as an “employee,” in the sense of deferring responsibility (the famous “I just work here”). Technically there’s nothing wrong with that, not everyone was born to be a problem solver. Some prefer to work on one thing, to be around a smaller group of people for longer, to limit their perspectives because they have no interest in cultivating (and maintaining, since knowing isn’t enough) a large network.

What many are after is at least a “false illusion” of “stability,” a word that lost its meaning in the 90s, after outsourcing and globalization. Or a “false illusion” of “purpose,” signing on to an “idea.”

I could write a whole article about “signing on to ideas or ideologies,” but I’ll sum it up like this: mostly it’s a false expectation, from a lack of experience and exposure to a broader perspective. As I said, the advantage of a consultancy is giving you that time of exposure to different ideas, people, situations, and perspectives, which trims the rough edges off illusions and teaches you how the real world works.

The thing is, there’s that annoying factor called “time.” Most young people today have less and less patience and are more impatient for instant results than I was back in my day. The irony is that my seniors used to call me impatient, and even so, for me it was always natural to take one step back to walk two forward.

On those who want to open their own business, many justify themselves with lines like “I’m going to work for me and not for others.” That line is a huge false premise. In practice you “never” worked “for others.” Have you ever worked for free, with no compensation at all?

If you got paid, then by definition you worked for yourself, trading your capacity and the quality of your service for money. When you open your own company, you’ll make the same trade again. The earlier and the more inexperienced you do it, the proportionally greater the chance it won’t work out. It shouldn’t be a hard line to grasp, but understanding comes with knowledge and experience, and not with recklessness.

And what defines a “consultancy” for me? I like to think of it, philosophically, as a “meta-company”: a company that carries parts of other companies and needs to be better than them. It doesn’t mean it always will be better, but that’s the “mission” to be pursued without letup. A career in general is exactly that, and being a consultant is taking on that mission more explicitly.

In the end, my goal was always not to repeat what I described in my 2007 Vent: to build a financially healthy company, win clients and close contracts a freelancer couldn’t, with security for both sides. To create a routine that doesn’t require working more than 8 hours a day and 5 days a week. And to build teams as cells exclusive to each client, without the intermediation of an “operational boss,” giving each consultant the chance to learn all the non-technical functions I mentioned above.

2012 was a year of learning and experimentation, with far more problems than I could foresee. Fortunately, my years in consulting gave me the foundation to close out every one of them. Honestly, I can’t picture myself in 2002, when I started in consulting, handling today’s situations and making the same hard decisions.

If I had opened a consultancy in 2002, or any company, I would have closed it, unless I’d had “luck.” And betting on games of chance isn’t what makes a good consultant.

Happy New Year! See you in 2013.

It’ll probably be nostalgic for some, which is always nice. For the younger crowd, maybe it shows that a résumé isn’t built from certificates alone. Experience takes time, a lot of time, but quantity of time is not the same as quality. It all comes down to merging what you really want with what you really love. It’s not for everyone, but if you have that instinct, you know what I’m talking about.

The road is long and endless, so never say “I already know everything I need.” You will never know everything you need. Learning is a daily process, hour by hour: a little during work, and a lot more outside of it.

People who know what they’re doing couldn’t care less about what others say or do. You just do what you know (not what you “think”) is the best path. Right and wrong is a coin flip: on average you’ll be right 50% of the time, like everyone else. The “right path” comes from analyzing the facts you have. Learned something new? Redo the analysis and revise the path.

Dogmas are useless. Stay rational and disciplined, and your odds improve. Never close your own doors: be selective about what you learn, but don’t discard options out of prejudice.

Do what you love. It’s a cliché, I know, but it’s the only thing that works. My résumé didn’t start at my first job: I’ve dedicated my whole life to this, for as long as I can remember, and I never had a plan B. You don’t have to be like that, and it doesn’t mean I know a lot. I know plenty of younger people who started later and already know way more than I do.

I told a friend the other day: “we’re all moving targets.” If you have an idol, it’s because they’re something you’d like to become. You run in that direction and, by the time you reach the level you wanted, your idol has already run a few leagues further. And off you go, chasing again.

Again: there’s no recipe, no step-by-step guide. Not everyone can be a painter, a fashion designer, or a journalist. I’m definitely not a good cook, I’ll hardly ever be a decent carpenter, and I’ll certainly never be a musician. Nobody should pick an occupation based solely on what pays best today. And tomorrow?

In 1985 I was inspired for the first time by a comic book: a special Disney edition called, if I recall correctly, The History of Computers. If anyone still has a copy, with the center pull-out and in good condition, I’m interested in buying it! Guided by Gyro Gearloose and Professor Ludwig Von Drake, I met Charles Babbage, Blaise Pascal, Konrad Zuse, and other names I never forgot. I’ve considered myself a “computing archaeologist” ever since, and I keep coming back to the subject through encyclopedias, books, and articles. My dream machine back then was a Unitron, the Brazilian clone of the original Macintosh, freshly released.

In 1987 my cousin had an MSX Hotbit and I wanted to play his games. I learned a bit of Basic to load the cassette games. My favorite reading was the magazine Micro Sistemas, and Assembly was still out of reach for me. My dream machine was a CP-500 that an acquaintance owned. I tried reading an electronics book, but it was too much for me: I was never good at that. I was only starting to grasp what “expanding RAM” meant.

There were lots of cool micros back then. Today everyone admires the new phones in store windows; in my day I’d stand in front of display cases staring at Apple II clones, Gradiente’s MSX, the Sinclair, the TK-90X, the CP-400. They were too expensive for me to own, so all I could do was imagine those machines while reading their spec sheets.

In 1988 I took a GW-Basic course. I had no computer, but I learned to program on paper. I also got my first taste of gems of the era like Wordstar and Lotus 1-2-3. I think that’s around when I started getting addicted to video games: I already had an Intellivision, and I finally got a Master System!

In 1989 I got my first PC-XT and learned dBase III and Clipper Summer 87. I had two uncles who had been programming since Autumn 86. That’s when I wrote my first booklet, which had nothing original about it: I copied text from books and encyclopedias simply because I enjoyed practicing typing. Thanks to that, today I hit 400 keystrokes per minute, plus a few strange hand pains :-) Before the XT, my hobby was copying text on a trusty old Olivetti; with a computer keyboard, much lighter, my fingers were grateful. Since the previous year, my favorite reading had been the beloved Micro Sistemas magazine, one of the few quality options at the time.

In 1990 I did odd jobs with my uncle, who was a systems analyst. I built several little systems in Clipper 5.0 and FoxPro, the good old days of Ashton-Tate and Nantucket. I created my own text editor in Clipper, but I was no match for the good old Norton Editor paired with Sidekick. There were few language options back then, and you could spend months on a single one. Unfortunately I never got very interested in low-level languages like Assembly and C: I read a few books but never practiced. Big mistake.

In 1991 I started messing around with BBSes with my neighbor. I was introduced to the power of Pascal, still just watching from afar. Good times of FidoNet, PCBoard, Remote Access, Warez, blue boxes, and the like. Long before the Orkut and MSN era, I was already burning hours on message boards. My dream was to get Windows 3.1 running on my XT with its green CGA monitor.

In 1993 I worked as a game presenter at Brasoft Games during school break. It was interesting because I got access to “MPCs,” the multimedia PCs with CD-ROM and sound card, optional and expensive extras at the time. I’ll never forget the LucasArts gems, like Day of the Tentacle. Nothing to do with programming, but it mattered for my sense of aesthetics and possibility. Masterpieces of the era? Wolfenstein and Doom, the originals, of course.

In 1993 (or was it 1992?) I liked to draw. I dabbled as an illustrator until around 1998, when I gave it up for good. That year I wanted to do illustrations for a games magazine (did I mention I was addicted?). I took my portfolio to the editor, and he suggested I learn to illustrate on a computer, since all I had was freehand drawings. I went home and that same day bought a book on CorelDraw! 3.0, a brick of a book from the Berkeley publishing house that I still remember. A few weeks later I came back with a brand-new portfolio, all done in CorelDraw!. I illustrated some six issues, wrote one article, contributed here and there, and quit: it wasn’t my calling. But the notions of Bezier curves and vectorization would come in handy when I later picked up Flash.

In 1994 I took my only break from hobbies and computers: entrance exam year. I studied at least 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. I set goals, planned, and passed. I never had a second option, so passing on the first try was all I had: USP and Unicamp, at minimum, were mandatory. That was the year’s big lesson: set goals, draw the plan, follow each step while correcting course along the way, but don’t stop.

In 1995 I entered USP. In the first semester I had to turn in work in Turbo Pascal, and I built my first framework, a graphics toolkit for Pascal, plus some fractal tricks. I finally understood the importance of the previous decades of computing and became a fan of Donald Knuth and Niklaus Wirth.

I got my first internet account, with one catch: terminal-only Unix access. I had to learn Unix to use the internet. Gopher, Lynx, Pine, good times. It was also the first time I confronted a major deficiency: my terrible English. When I saw some classmates were good at it, I decided I couldn’t fall behind (and that’s how the article Be Arrogant! came to be). It was a pre-Google era: I used the early versions of Yahoo!, WebCrawler, even Amazon (which was ugly back then).

This was also the year I waited most eagerly for a piece of software: Windows 95. I read everything I could find about it and never dissected an operating system that thoroughly; in fact, since DOS 3.1 I’d been exploring every corner and back alley. I was also excited about the brand-new OS/2 Warp, some 20 3.5" floppies, if I recall correctly! Running Windows 3.1 virtualized inside OS/2 was amazing, the same feeling I got years later running Windows XP virtualized on my OS X for the first time. Those topics are what finally got me interested in systems architecture and the evolution of operating systems.

In 1996 I did a side gig on a little system for Windows 3.1 (I know, I know). I learned Delphi 1.0, released a year earlier. I was already a Turbo Pascal fan, so Object Pascal came naturally: my first step toward the “fad” of the era, so-called Object-Oriented Programming. UML showed up around that time, but before it I was already poking around the original methodologies: Booch, Objectory, Fusion. I always found the subject kind of boring.

I also started learning Java 1.0, after downloading the betas from Unicamp’s FTP. But AWT didn’t seem good enough, so I stuck with Delphi. Strange to think about it today: back then Borland looked so big.

I built a few personal sites about my hobbies. Yep, I was once an anime and manga fanatic, and I made my first “successful” website, quotes very much intended, because I stirred controversy even in my hobbies. There was nothing in Portuguese on the subject, so I translated manga and subtitled anime. I’ve known Japanese since I was a kid, which helped, and translation is nothing new for me :-) Building personal sites, I dissected every trick of the era using only HTML, JavaScript, and lots of Photoshop. I also played around quite a bit with Windows for Workgroups networks and OS/2 1.3.

In 1997 I started working at a multimedia production house. I leveled up in web design, got to work with Macs (on the beloved System 8), and had to learn Director 5/Lingo and Flash 2/ActionScript. Building interactive applications in Director on a Pentium 200 MHz with 32 MB of RAM wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it was fun. I lost count of how many times I slept on the office floor waiting for files to burn onto Zip drives, or CDs writing at 2x.

By then Linux was already quite famous. I made my first attempts to level up my Unix with a RedHat 4.2, whose little blue box with the red logo I’ll never forget. A few years earlier I’d tried Slackware 1.0, but gave up after frustrated installs, incompatible hardware, and driver problems.

In 1998 I had my first contact with server-side: Microsoft Index Server, SQL Server 6.5, and ASP. It wasn’t much fun, but at least I learned a lot of SQL. Newsgroups were always my safety net, and the DejaNews site was a real find: an indexed archive of Usenet, now known as Google Groups. My use of that kind of service dropped a lot since then. Did the quality drop with it?

In 1999 I had to build sites in PHP and a few Perl scripts for Apache. I learned regular expressions the hard way: I should have known Regex already, so I learned it once and for all, and it makes a huge difference to this day. I had to level up on Linux and the whole toolchain around it, and fortunately the era’s RedHat 7 was already quite good. I ran all sorts of experiments with protocols and understood why knowing them matters. I don’t remember how or why, but that’s when I became a devoted Slashdot reader, my daily reading, religiously, ever since.

In 2000 I had to build a site in Zope/Python. I always figured that system, with its ZODB, Products, and DTML concepts, had the potential to grow a lot. It grew, but not the way I imagined. Today I think Plone is nice, but with the feeling that it missed its market window. It was my first contact with Python and the first time I heard of a language called Ruby, which I paid no attention to at the time.

In 2001 I had to build several sites and systems with ASP and other Microsoft technologies, like VB and DCOM (you have to respect Don Box). Dealing with limitations is always a great way to grow: when you have a lot, you waste; when you have little, you learn to optimize. Generating DCOM components with VBScript was fun. I did a lot of “Ajax,” except back then it had no such name (MSXML and DHTML already existed), and lots of “Web Services,” which didn’t have that name yet either (HTTP and XML already existed, of course). Amazing how half a decade later these things come back with new names and everyone thinks they’re novelties.

.NET looked very promising in Beta 1, and I remember building a framework for ASP using ASP.NET concepts. It may seem odd to jump from the previous year’s Linux world back to Windows Server. I never understood why, to like one thing, you “have to” trash the other. My job has always been just one: solve problems within the constraints I’m given, regardless of technology or platform. Period.

In 2002 I had to integrate an ASP system with an SAP R/3 one, so I had to learn ABAP. The book “Learn ABAP/4 in 24 Hours” took, in fact, 48 hours. Knowing the concepts of DCOM and CORBA paid off: I already knew what RFC was and how to handle a distributed environment. This is where my “career” as a hired gun (also known as a “consultant”) begins: lots of work, little added value. My learning had ups and downs in the following years, and my pace slowed until 2006.

In 2003 I had to build systems on SAP Portal and Java, and learned things like Hibernate and Struts. With no access to SAP’s Java server source code, all I could do was decompile the classes and explore. I also had to make a cell phone talk to SAP systems, hand-coding the protocols. After that bit-scrubbing exercise, I never forgot the difference between Big Endian and Little Endian, nor how annoying the iDEN protocol is to deal with. I handled some cryptography and reinforced my notions of security, encryption, and authentication. You can never be too paranoid.

In 2004 I needed a version control system and learned Subversion. I never had a good feeling about CVS. Subversion was still beta, full of bugs, and I even had to patch TortoiseSVN to work with Visual Studio .NET, but I felt SVN would be big. Fortunately, I was right. I think it was the year I wrote the most Java: I hunted every kind of bug in the freshly launched SAP Portal, built a productive framework on top of the lousy one that shipped with the product, and did a lot of integration with R/3 systems.

In 2005 I had to integrate telecommunications systems and learned a bit of Tuxedo/C++. ESB, SOA, and similar acronyms proved to be vendor bullshit, as I always said. Communication and integration were never novelties: renaming things to sound new doesn’t help. EAI is one of the oldest things in the world; integration existed since the second computer was built. Around that time I was poking at the project management world, and someone convinced me to get PMP certified. Waste of time: I got certified but never liked the method. I spent some time studying CMMi and other methodologies and lost interest fast. I already know I have no calling for too much talk.

In 2006 I had to deal with more telecommunications systems, now with webMethods. More “SOA,” more “XML,” no problem. Why does everyone struggle to integrate hybrid systems? Whoever knows SAP doesn’t know webMethods, whoever knows webMethods knows little Java, whoever knows Java doesn’t know the other two. It’s all lack of will.

In parallel, Rails entered the picture, and off I went to write a book. Amazing how the thing exploded abroad while nobody here paid it proper attention. It’s the old chicken-and-egg problem: programmers won’t learn because there’s no market, the market isn’t interested because there are no programmers. One side has to move first. Americans are experts at first steps; we’re doctors at waiting for time to pass. But I never paid attention to the others. A month and a half of writing nearly drove me insane; sleeping 4 hours a night is not normal. The book came out, the blog is here and, most importantly, I learned a lot. Luckily more people are getting interested in the subject. Maybe soon we’ll cross the tipping point between the number of professionals and market interest.

Finally, in 2007 I was fed up with consulting and with clients. Turning a blind eye to idiotic things was never my style. I walked away from those who never truly supported me and decided to fly solo. If you ever hear the word “Balance,” run! I mean it! But good coincidences do happen: after almost a year and a half talking about Rails, I finally got to work with it full time.

And here’s the thing: what got me hired was the result of the previous 22 years. The Rails year weighed little.

I hope this tickled everyone’s curiosity. The biographies of the people I’ve interviewed far surpass mine, and I’ve met plenty of people with much better stories. Mine, for now, is reasonable.

As I said before, I’m a moving target too. Tomorrow I’ll be writing the 2007, 2008, 2009 retrospective. Next year I’ll know many things I don’t know today, and not by accident: everybody learns something new, unless they’re a vegetable. I’m talking about a conscious effort to learn.

I won’t stagnate in Ruby, as much as I like it. It doesn’t matter whether the novelty comes from the open source world, from Apple, from IBM, or from Microsoft: we have to watch everything. A cook with 10 years in the kitchen who only knows how to make the same half-dozen dishes is an automaton, not a master. Ten or twenty years make no difference. And automatons are easily replaced.

“A consultant is like a hooker: paid by the hour, does what the client wants, when the client wants it, and the one who pockets the money is the pimp.”

Yes, I’m a consultant. And there’s one piece of advice I love to give: keep two eyes looking forward and one looking back. Anyone who follows this blog knows I spent 5 years at the same consulting firm. That’s too long. One more thing to remember: don’t stay more than 3 years in the same place, especially if you’re under 30.

In 10 years I switched companies about 5 times, and inside the firm I hopped across several clients. It’s stressful, granted, but worth it. If you stay open to learning, you’ll pick up solid lessons for the future.

Consulting firms are particularly dangerous, the small ones above all, and even more so when they resemble my former employer. One of the reasons I left (there were several) was the late paychecks. Wait, not paychecks. Invoices.

Remember: when you work as an incorporated entity, the relationship stops being boss and employee and becomes client and vendor. You deliver a service, issue an invoice, and bill for payment.

Back in 2004 we had already been through a similar crisis. And mind you, consulting is a business that practically can’t lose money. They hire you at R$ 50 an hour and sell you to the client for up to R$ 100. That’s a markup of up to 100%. I’ve seen grunts who make under R$ 40 an hour being billed out at R$ 250.

For the consultant, the firm works like insurance: you outsource to them the hassle of dealing with clients, chasing projects, and managing allocations. It’s like a health plan: you pay a monthly premium and, in return, they’re obligated to keep you steady, paying on time and placing you on good projects.

Do the homework and the firm always has a healthy reserve; cash flow is simple. It’s a gold mine. Especially in a world like SAP, where consultants command artificially inflated rates thanks to the limited, pornographically expensive pipeline for certifying new consultants, of abysmal quality, I might add. Clients pay through the nose for lousy service and don’t complain: the perfect racket.

When a consulting firm shows signs of financial trouble, that’s the red flag: jump ship as fast as you can, no second thoughts. If the client throws a tantrum, delays an invoice, or stalls, that’s the firm’s problem. That is exactly what we pay that insurance for: so the firm stands between the client and you. A consultant who works the hours logged correctly has the right to be paid on the dates in the contract.

“A deal’s a deal.”

When that doesn’t happen, it’s a sign of administrative incompetence and of deep disrespect toward the consultant, the firm’s actual workforce. At bottom, it’s plain stupidity: shooting yourself in the foot. A consulting firm is nothing but a bureaucratic apparatus whose single obligation is to manage itself.

The “we’re investing heavily in the company’s future” excuse doesn’t stick. Sacrificing payroll is stupid spending. You don’t mess with the basics. Would you skip your home’s electricity bill to buy a computer? I doubt it, because the power will get cut, and then the computer is useless.

The curious trap I see so many people fall into is believing. When we’re young, we sometimes think we’ve found the next Steve Jobs: the visionary who breaks every mold and will change the world. BE CAREFUL. It’s the old con game: there has been exactly one Steve Jobs in the last 30 years. The math is clear: the far likelier bet is that he’s just a starry-eyed narcissist.

And you’ll end up working for free for him, killing yourself for him, sacrificing your personal life. For nothing.

I’ll repeat the warning: from politicians to cheap hustlers, they all have excellent speeches. Seductive talk, the kind that almost convinces you to drop your pants, work for free, and sacrifice yourself for nothing. Remember the client-vendor relationship? However “valued” you think you are, as a consultant you’re a resource: an outsourced one and, by definition, replaceable.

Nothing wrong with that, as long as you put yourself in that position. You are NOT a partner in the company, and the firm’s fate is not in your hands, however much we’d like to believe it. When the rope tightens, you’re the one left hanging.

That doesn’t give you a license to slack off. Give it your all, but do it for yourself. Treat the late nights as an investment in your own learning, one that happens to help the company along the way.

I’ve told a few people this story, but here it goes again. I wanted to put a down payment on an apartment last year. Since I didn’t trust the firm’s health, I didn’t. I also traded in my car last year and could have paid cash. After an hour of number crunching (learn to use the HP-12C!), I chose to finance.

It all paid off: I kept my liquidity. And that liquidity is what bankrolled the decision I made last month: abandoning a sinking ship.

Lucky for me, Surgeworks crossed my path right around then. But I wasn’t counting on it. Always plan for the worst case: months of unemployment. You need reserves with good liquidity for those stretches.

You can also shrink the worst case. That’s where my earlier articles about being self-taught and investing in your learning and your network come in: I figured I could end up unemployed, yet I got several good offers on the same day, and firms still call to this day. Keep your options open, both in knowledge and in cash, so you never have to take scraps from anyone. Do that and you’ll rarely have trouble.

This warning matters. I’ve seen ugly scenarios, and they made me cautious. Never bite off more than you can chew, never depend on anyone. Never let anyone “take care” of you: own and know your own books, budgets, and taxes.

Even if you’re a regular employee at a company that starts showing these symptoms, prepare your exit. Stop being dazzled and don’t take on big debts you don’t need. And above all: don’t get swept up by speeches. When times are good, you’re “highly regarded,” they treat you well, and every now and then you even get a small raise or some trinket.

Even so, you’ll be working for less than you’re worth. And when things get ugly, they’ll call you in to “help out,” unpaid, sacrificing your personal life all over again.

If you choose to leave, all that “regard” goes down the drain: you become the backstabber, the guy who bailed when they needed you most, blah blah blah. Don’t be intimidated. If the company is going under, that’s on them: they broke the bond of trust first.

In my case, in 5 years I never burdened the company, not even by taking vacation. Last year I worked hard, consecutive Saturdays, no holidays. The day I announced I was leaving, what was the first thing I heard? “You know there’s a termination penalty.” There went the “regard.” The pompous speech of yesteryear vanishes and the naked truth shows up. That’s when the masks come off.

It didn’t surprise me or frustrate me, because I practice what I preach: I plan for the worst case. And it happens. Big surprise. Another page turned.

I left with over a month and a half of payments in arrears. I send collection emails, and you know what I hear back? “I’ll pay you R$ 1,000 a month, starting at the end of July.” Amazing how low a company can sink. I feel like I’m begging change from a beggar. What can you do? Almost nothing beats nothing. I just want what’s mine, and that’s another thing to remember: what’s yours, you collect.

Five years delivering every project successfully, keeping every client happy, pulling all-nighters, working holidays, skipping family weekends, not taking my wife on a trip in the last 4 years, not even making it to my grandfather’s funeral. In the end, that’s how a “resource” gets treated: like just another “resource.”

Use consulting firms the way they use you. They’re still a “way in” to plenty of clients, especially the big-name ones, which are usually backwards, crony-ridden, and highly inefficient. But names like that look good on a résumé, and everyone needs to suffer through an inefficient company to learn how not to do things.

Do good work. Grow. Learn. But be very careful: hustlers are a constant in this market.

This is the translation of the commencement address Steve Jobs delivered to Stanford University’s graduating class on June 12, 2005. Coincidentally, I stumbled across this video again exactly two years later.

We all know Steve Jobs gives excellent speeches, but this one is particularly interesting. Deep down it may sound corny, even dated, but it holds some of the lessons I learned myself. The irony is that the only people who will appreciate this text are the ones who already know what it means.

I also recommend watching the video, available on YouTube!

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

Connecting the Dots

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

Love and Loss

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

Death

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

© Stanford University. All Rights Reserved. Stanford, CA 94305. (650) 723-2300.

Either way, the post on the Signal vs Noise blog shows the status of the translations from other countries. I’m proud to say we are WAY ahead: most of them are still on the first chapter. We already finished translating all 16 chapters and we’re halfway through the review.

Which is why I called it “Release Candidate 2”. RC1 was a restricted release, RC2 is public, and in a few days we’ll try to ship the final version!

Thanks to the translators: Herval Freire, Juraci Krohling Costa, Marcello Rocha, Diogo Bispo, Adriano Mitre, Ricardo Augusto, Rodrigo K.

And also to the reviewers: Mateus Del Bianco, Diogo Bispo, Davis Zanetti Cabral, Gustavo Cardoso, Ricardo Augusto.

(Hope I didn’t forget anyone :-)