From IT services to software development

Intro

IT is just huge. There are a lot of areas and specialties and sometimes many of us navigate through those areas or even between other ships.

Here's a brief of my real story from IT services to software development.

The beginning

I can say that my journey with tech started when I was 16 in high school.

My high school was tech-focused, so I had the opportunity to meet for the first time Portugol (pseudo-algorithm code in Portuguese), HTML, CSS, Javascript, VB.NET, and Linux.

When I was in my second year of high school, I got an internship to work at FIAP, the biggest tech university in Brazil, to assist students and professors during classes in tech labs.

My internship not only directed me to choose my college course and institution but also helped me to get a scholarship to a Bachelor of Information Systems course.

After two years of internship and in my first year of college, I got a promotion to work from nine to five as an IT Support Analyst at FIAP.

The university campuses are huge and were challenging to provide support not only to students but also to administrative areas.

At college, I learned about C, Java, and SQL.

After college

I worked as an IT Support Analyst for four years and finally graduated. After graduating, FIAP offered me a position to work as an IT Infrastructure Analyst.

Then, my job was to keep IT servers and configs running for all university campuses.

After almost one year of working with IT Infrastructure, I got an opportunity to join a consultancy called Atos to work as a Client Service Analyst in one of its biggest clients in Brazil.

My role then was to provide advanced desk-side support for multiple users in Brazil.

Switching focus to project management

At Atos, I got an opportunity to join a global Project Management Office and lead demand management for special IT services for North America and Latin America.

It was required to increase my knowledge about IT projects and then I started an MBA in Project Management at FGV, a renamed university in Brazil.

After almost a year, I decided to leave for personal reasons.

And suddenly, it became very hard to find a job in project management.

Creating a new career path

I started to look for jobs and got ITIL certified, but there weren't doors opening. I went to many interviews, but wasn't hired.

Then, I tried to analyze my life in the big picture.

Since getting a job to work with project management was hard at the moment and I didn't want to work with IT Support anymore I started to figure out how could I combine all my skills and work with something that would be challenging and at the same time rewarding.

I started to look for new areas of knowledge and software development drew my attention. There were a lot of opportunities to work with at that time and seemed to be very solid to create a career path with many possibilities.

I started to study the basics of C# and found it very pleasing. It reminds me of my happy old days in high school with Portugol and VB.NET creating things but looked better and more powerful combined with .NET. Voilá, something that I enjoyed but never focused to work with.

My thoughts at that moment were maybe by working as a software developer I could combine my infrastructure and project management skills to create value as a professional.

And that's exactly what happened. After studying and getting prepared for a few months I started to apply for some software developers jobs.

I got my first opportunity at Cognizant to work as a .NET Developer for a client, the Brazilian biggest bank institution.

The challenge was to develop a web system for real estate users.

And that's how the software development journey started for me back in 2019!

Since then, well, it has been a long and intense journey. I can say I've been adding a new brick to it every day.