Early years and where you came from?

I was born in the fall of 1979. I am the middle daughter, with a difference of 5 years for my older sister and only 13 months for my brother. This very short age difference allowed me to live most of the time in my childhood at the home of my maternal grandparents. My parents are both from humble families and lived very disturbing first-person stories for me. My maternal grandparents: my grandmother was a housewife, my grandfather was a carpenter in Lisnave. I made wonderful little wooden boats to earn extra money and drew with me to learn. With them, I learned among so many things the beauty of humility, of true and disinterested love, of attention to the most fragile and disadvantaged in the many stories that I was lucky enough to share with me and for other things that I myself saw happen. The parents: both worked in the fields, in a very small village near Vila Nova de Foz Côa. With them I got to know the aromas and flavors of the countryside, I experienced washing clothes in the community stone tank (and I saw my grandmother carrying a pitcher of blue water over her head) or a warning that someone was on the phone and it was for her, at the supermarket 700 meters from home. I picked fruits from the trees to eat, harvested them and ate delicious soup cooked in the fireplace in the cast iron pots. I was always very attentive, a sponge absorbing the stories and trying to understand in me what it would be like for my parents to have experienced all those difficulties and emotions so young. Nothing for them was easy. My father, for example, came to Lisbon when he was only 11 years old to work and not weigh in the family budget, after all the boys were the oldest and were 5 children. He worked as a bellboy at the hotel where he returned 24 years later as general manager, and where he is still 70 years old. My mother as the eldest daughter, “oh if something was missing”, I would soon get a line to make berets until a child’s eyes were closed so that a neighbor could take her to sell in Lisbon. I know so many stories. And let me say, whoever with 2 fingers of forehead hears and keeps stories saves a lot of problems and still gets a lot of bonuses in the so-called “intuition”. I lived in Almada and every time my mother or grandmother announced to me that we were going to Lisbon, I gathered all the coins I had kept in the purse to distribute on Rua Augusta to the many people who sat there sharing their needs in vulnerability. in Advertising but had a passion for fashion design. Fortunately (I believe now) I couldn’t get in and I opted for Advertising because I believed it would give me some important notions of business management, etc., things that design never allows. Always self-taught, I learned to work with all the necessary programs at the time, and I even worked as an Advertising Designer with recognized brands such as Delta, etc., but always maintaining the (strange in this role) connection to customers as “Account” or “ bridge “between the client and the agency. I learned here not only to do many things that allow me to be autonomous in this area but also to nurture the taste for contact with people, to achieve more than attract clients, to help solve challenges with partners. At 23 I sensibly decided that I was going to do a volunteer experience and in India, a country that has always captivated me immensely. I started looking for solutions, I changed my job to Account in a hotel, and I elaborated a study and socioeconomic framework in the chosen area and in the beginning of 2006 I presented to Fundação Oriente. I won a small scholarship, said goodbye and went. This experience went “very poorly”, from departure to return, which had to be anticipated but would repeat everything again. Then, in 2012, I came back to know India, and from Portugal, I was making the “bridge” for an NGO in Goa. In 2015 I asked for a kind of unpaid leave and went, for 10 days, as a volunteer to Cambodia. There I visited several schools, villages, I saw hundreds of children, I played with them, I filled balloons, I sang, but the truth is that I arrived in Portugal and I was on track. I really felt that I had not changed the life of a single child, nor of the girl who had touched me so much by his sad and dull look in one of the villages visited. In a conversation with a Buddhist monk, I asked him how he could help his people, and he asked me to “stop” giving them the fish and teach them how to fish. Hence the name of the project that I created on my return, 100% voluntary, Teach How to Fish, with which I intend to create a community made up of people from different backgrounds, whose objective is to transform the dependence of charity into self-sufficiency. I started the project with the family of this girl and 9 more from the same village, and we are currently working with 4 more families. I started the Project in Cambodia for a very simple matter: being able to travel alone safely. …

Early years and where you came from?

I like to think that my early years were not that long haha but, in 2005 I came to Lisbon to study Electronics Engineering from Azores and turned Lisbon into my place to call home. I was a super active kid/teenage (and still am), practicing all kinds of sports (literally!) special if it involves the ocean and waves.

How were you introduced to the world of the Portuguese tech industry?

I was first introduced to the tech industry in my first job at Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) as a Hardware Developer. I was part of the Optical Networks business unit part of the team that was designing and testing the amplification of the optical fiber signal to be transported through Network Elements from, for example, Lisbon to Madrid. Super excited at the time because I had a huge “hunger” for technology, in particular how the hardware was able to do such amazing things at that time. …

Early years and where you came from?

I was born and lived in Lisbon until I was 5 years old, then I moved to my father’s hometown, Fátima, where I stayed until the age of 18. I return to Lisbon to study Biomedical Engineering and Biophysics master's degree.

How were you introduced to the world of the Portuguese tech industry?

When I started working at AskBlue.

Walk me through your work and what you are doing now in the tech industry.

I am, currently, a team leader, responsible for the development of Outsystems technology projects. I lead an end-to-end development project, from scratch, starting with the business and requirements analysis, the design of the technical solution and its architecture and then the development itself. …

Early years and where you came from?

I studied Psychology in ISCTE-IUL, and when I started my Master's Degree I decided to delay this decision. I took a chance and I moved to Dubai to work in the Aviation Industry for almost 5 years!

How were you introduced to the world of the Portuguese tech industry?

Since I studied in ISCTE-IUL, luckily I was always in contact with IT students, I always found it fascinated to be around them, it was my way to have some more knowledge about the tech world. In 2018 when I returned to Lisbon, I started working in the tech industry as a Recruiter, but I wanted to be more involved in career management, and in 2019 I was presented with the challenge to work for OutFit — an OutSystems Center of Excellence. …

Early years and where you came from?

I have an atypical path. I have always dreamed of making a difference and I have tried to do it in several ways. I started in the social area, doing an internship in a support office for victims of domestic violence and in a psychiatric clinic. I felt that I wasn’t doing enough and I switched to the human resources area with the ambition of making the work more adapted to the needs of the workers. Here I worked in IT companies and had contact with the technological area and I fell in love with this area. …

Early years and where you came from?

I finished my degree at the University of Toronto in Canada. Then, back to Hong Kong and started my professional career as a flight attendant, I have also been a high school teacher in Japan, worked for an NGO in China before I was exposed to the tech world. In my previous job as a Customer Success Manager, I often got help from our Support Engineers, where I started developing my passion for tech, my journey started with learning simple regEx.

How were you introduced to the world of the Portuguese tech industry?

Thanks to Cloudflare! …

Early years and where you came from?

From a very young age, I knew I was comfortable at communicating with others and bringing my ideas to life. I studied journalism at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and then I decided to focus on Fashion Journalism by doing a Master's Degree at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) and a Coolhunting Course at the University of the Arts (London).

How were you introduced to the world of the Portuguese tech industry?

I would say that my very first contact with the Portuguese tech industry was when I was at University and I decided to help two young entrepreneurs at the very beginning stage of their first start-up: Style in a Box. Back then my mission was to raise brand awareness of the new business so it would be possible to raise new investment rounds. …

Early years and where you came from?

When I was 6,7 years old, someone asked me “what do you wanna be when you grow?” and my answer was “I’m want to be a computer engineer.” When the day to apply to university came, I was sure that my previous answer was correct and computer science was the correct decision. Thus, I applied to Computer Engineering and Telematics at the University of Aveiro. During five years and a lot of nights thinking that maybe my answer was wrong, I finished my Master’s Degree and started as a researcher in the Telecommunications Institute in Aveiro. During one year, I was able to work in the research field in machine learning and data science. However, the industry was always my passion so I applied to Altice Labs where a have worked as a Big Data Engineer for 6 months. In January I started a new adventure and started working as a remote Software Engineer and it has been showing to be a great experience. …