In early 2011 I found out my wife was pregnant. After all the champagne juice celebration I realized the freelancing lifestyle would have to wait a bit longer. That day I looked at the cooler job boards of the day (github and stackoverflow: still reasonably good choices to this day) and found only two gigs matching my skills that would allow me to work remotely. Two emails sent. Only one of them replied. After one very intense phone interview (hi Adam ) I got the gig.
It was a big change from my previous work. Instead of working on quick throwaway projects for various clients I would now work on an actual product. One with thousands of users daily. Something with potential, that real people used, that made their lives better.
During that time lots of things happened at Amara. We changed names ( universalsubtitles was cool, but such a pitta to type 50 times a day). We grew (and out grew) our team. We went from serving many users to a whole-lot of users. We actually signed customers in. Paying customers. Folks that were fanatical about getting work done. Features. Edge cases. Things you never thought of even in your sleep deprived dreams. Things you can’t believe someone actually needs. Things that would make your mother blush. We went from few features to a dear-lord-this-stuff-gets-complicated kind of thing. Lots of new code. Lots of code deleted. We went from one deployment every 8 weeks to deploying weekly. From bash-scripts-from-hell to nice little puppet things that really work and won’t make you avoid changes like the plague. From thinking that Google Closure is kind of interesting to Google Closure is the plague. From “God don’t make me deal with browsers” to “browsers are actually fun”.
But as all good things, this too would come to an end.
I’ve been wanting to do the start-up thing for a long time. And now finally things have lined up. I’m leaving Amara, broken hearted and all, to do this thing. It will be fun. It will change (a bit) people’s live (hopefully lots of people). It will be done in my hometown. It will be done with an awesome co-founder. It will give me butterflies in my stomach and a pounding head. A chance to take part in the embryonic start up scene in São Paulo, so fragile, so lacking in local success stories.
PCF is a place where awesome people work for the greater good, where people enjoy and respect each other. If I wasn’t uncomfortable calling my bosses bosses, I’d say they are the best ones I’ve ever had. Much much thanks to the entire crew, past and present: Holmes, Nicholas, Dean, Adam, Dmitriy, Rob, Janet, Maggie, Craig, Steve, Nick, Fernando, Honza, Evan, Aleli, Juliana, Darren and Ben: it’s been a pleasure.
And now on to new things.
Cheers!
Good luck my good friend! Ping me at anytime and let's have a beer! I do have some stuff to talk to you :)