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Hi y'all!

I'm Henrique, a software engineer from Brazil. I've been working with web stack applications for 4.5 years now, mostly with the Javascript/Node.js ecosystem.

I'm a VImer. Not a purist though. Lots (LOTS!) of plugins. Here's my vimrc if someone's interested.

I use Linux as my main OS. Started with Ubuntu, went to Debian and Mint, but they weren't good enough for me. Then I discovered Arch based distros; started with Arch itself, but who's got the time to install it ¯_(ツ)_/¯? Eventually I settled for Manjaro with Cinnamon. I know my ways through the CLI as well.

Professionally I try to excel for software engineering and architecture best practices. I have always being some kind of (sometimes heated) advocate for them. What I enjoy the most are architectural discussions, but I try hard to avoid that leading to a BDUF (Big Design Up Front). I'm also into functional programming, just getting passed the basic stuff and starting to go more deeply into Category Theory (wish me luck).

My algorithmic skills are not so great currently, mostly because I forgot all that stuff I saw in college (dynamic programming is something that for unknown reasons have been completely wiped out from my memory) and my work have never included solving this kind of problems.

<rant-mode on> This gives me a hard time on white-boarding interviews or even LeetCode/HackerRank tasks if we're talking about complex algorithms, which ends up being a no go for many nice companies out there, even though I have a B. Sc. of Computer Engineering and proven experience on the field. </rant-mode>

I've been JavaScripting for about 10 years now. HTML and CSS go as much as long. I started with PHP, but eventually migrated to Node.js. I've used MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB during these years. I had an immersion on AWS a few years ago and can get myself around with it pretty well (EC2, ElasticBeanstalk, S3, SQS, Route53, CloudFront, CloudWatch, Kinseis, VPC, IAM, Lambda, CloudFormation). I've been using React professionally for about 1.5 years now, it's amazing. Next on my pipe I have: Go, Rust, Haskell, Vue.js and Kubernetes (not necessarily in that order).

I'm currently trying to shift my career towards blockchain, crypto and their applications, but feeling a little bit overwhelmed by how much this scene has changed since the last time I was looking into this from a professional perspective, which was on early 2016. Let's see what play out.

I'm not a traditional geek, in the sense I'm not really into comics, anime, games, RPG or any formely-geek-turned-mainstream stuff. I just happen to like building things and the way I chose to do so was through code.

Aside from software engineering and architecture, I'm into:

• Martial Arts/Self-Defense: I did some Karate as a kid, now I'm 2.5 years into Krav Maga (the original one), an Israeli self-defense technique. Currently I wield the orange belt.
• Photography: mostly amateur. I've been postponing being more serious about it for quite sometime now, part due time constraints, part due equipment being ridiculously expensive in Brazil. I do what I can with my phone camera. Sometimes I can get some really nice shots , but currently is more about luck than skill.
• Music: I used to play the guitar. I'm organizing myself to get back to it eventually. I've always dreamed about having a band, nothing serious, just for fun. Maybe that will come true someday. I'm mostly into Rock 'n Roll and Heavy Metal, but I also like some Brazilian rhythms known as Forró and Moda de Viola.
• Humanities: I'm mostly into Economics and Politics. I'm a hard core libertarian (no, I don't want to sell your kids in the black market), suspicious of any kind of government or government sponsored/protected corporations (which means pretty much any company of considerable size), no matter what the political view they claim to have. I believe in a world where all today considered to be state attributions can be provided by private institutions in a (real) competitive free market (yes, even free basic services for very poor people).
• Beer: I like experimenting local branded beers in every place I visit. I don't know exactly what is my favorite kind of beer (it's probably one between IPA, Witbier and Tripel), but I definitely don't like the black ones (like Bock or Stout). Lucky me Brazil has had a beer-craft explosion the past few years, so it's really easy to find good beers at a relatively good price here (would be even cheaper if it there wasn't a ~51% tax on alcoholic drinks). I currently live in a (very) small apartment, but as soon as I move to a house with a proper garden I might start my own amateur beer-craft.