Turning the Page: A New Chapter Begins

Turning the Page: A New Chapter Begins

Discovering why I'm here

I'm starting this blog to share the new knowledge I've acquired and the challenges in creating products in this new phase of my life.

I'm now following a different approach to product creation, where I only develop products that I can use, test, and eventually gather feedback from other users to improve them.

This blog also serves to organize and talk about the projects I've previously developed but never received much attention.

About Me

Born in Brazil in 1994.

Learning about Programming

My first contact with technology, specifically programming, at around 15 years old. I started with Delphi/Pascal textbooks and some HTML. I even dabbled in VisualBasic later on, but without much depth.

I started taking programming more seriously when I began learning PHP and MySQL, and the first projects came from this stack. Of course, jQuery, popular at the time, was included. These projects were not very serious, more focused on gaining knowledge.

In 2014, I got my first job in programming, working as a front-end developer at an e-commerce platform company. During this period, I learned a lot about CSS and UX, primarily.

Learning about Marketing

A significant change came when I switched to working as a full-stack developer on the marketing team at the same company and later took on the role of marketing manager (due to a sequence of events).

During this period, I learned a lot about marketing technically, advertising, ad tools, content marketing, design, communication, etc.

I also learned a lot about people management (the importance of having good people on your team), how to build an excellent team, give freedom, and guide. This learning was obtained by managing my team and also from the leaders I had. I worked with many fantastic people whom I will always admire.

Learning about Data

After another sequence of events, I ended up working on an analytics team, doing business analysis (relationship between commercial areas and analytics), evolving a lot with SQL, and finally, at the moment I'm writing, working with data engineering, learning a lot about setting up data infrastructure, managing large volumes of data, and also MLOps.

Projects

Over 12 years, I created several projects to apply my knowledge and also learn more by solving the problems that arose during the development of the projects.

Creating projects is a method I believe to be one of the most effective ways to gain and improve your knowledge. This is how I learned PHP, NodeJS, Python, Go (my focus is on this now), PostgreSQL, DevOps, and many other technologies and tools.

Past Projects

Previously, I had several projects created that worked very well only on my computer and never made it to a domain on the internet.

Apart from a school project that reached 115,000 views, only UserForever.com made it to "production."

UserForever was the project that came closest to turning a hobby project into a "startup" or something similar. The project didn't take off as I anticipated, but it was nice to have a finished project ready for use. It's not a project I'm proud of in terms of acquisition performance, but I learned a lot from the mistakes (especially the difference between managing something with various users versus something that is just starting from scratch).

Next Projects

I'm not sure if committing to planning for future things is a good idea, but this post is also a way to mark a point that I hope will be a turning point.

In the coming months, I plan to put some projects into production in a micro-SaaS model. As I explained at the beginning, all these projects are based on needs I encounter during the development of personal and professional projects. Additionally, I see that the projects have a significant commercial or technical interaction, where they can relate to each other.

UserForever

I plan to bring UserForever back to the "production environment" trying to fix the problems identified from the previous attempt.

The project has been live since 2020, always worked correctly, and I even did some tests with it, but it never had a customer. In this new phase, I want to give the project another chance by focusing on it again.

InApplet

InApplet.com is a domain I've had since 2013, and several ideas have had the name InApplet, but so far, nothing has been related to it.

Therefore, I don't want to relate a project to being InApplet. I will use InApplet to be a brand, something like a project holding. I hope to accelerate the development of projects with this and focus less on creating brands, websites, domains, etc., having everything under a single structure.

The next projects of InApplet that are or will be developed are:

  • A set of tools for server monitoring.

  • An app to monitor website performance, commonly identified as RUM (real user monitoring).

  • A marketing tool that I've been refining for several years and have always seen great potential in; this, in particular, I believe to be the project with the greatest potential.

Future

So far, that's a bit about me and what I'm doing. To find out what happens in the next "chapters," keep following me here on the blog (subscribe to the newsletter) or follow me on social media.