2-year retrospective and a glimpse of the future

Dear readers! Now that almost 12 months has passed, I decided to find a way of spending some time for a new post. At least some minutes each day.

First of all, I want to mention my satisfaction with the visits from so many places which I've never imagined would happen, and also apologize for so much time without a single post. But I aim to, through this post, share with readers about many recent changes in this blogger's life who is writing, which also will reflect on future posts in the blog.

The "Informata Brasileiro", myself, has passed whole 2011 and 2012 intensively studying "top of mind" technologies for software development, taking references from technology radars from influent companies of this field.

I focused on a comprehensive bibliography about TDD, BDD, Ruby on Rails, Scala, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, besides some videos as those of Ryan Bates. I also became highly interested but searched not so deeply other subjects as non-relational databases (NoSQL), JVM mechanics, etc.

I liked these "technological researches" a lot, however something led me into a 90-degree turn (not 180-degree, not so much).

I realized, perhaps with some equivocation, perhaps not, that once I, a "householder", mastered all of it, I would still stay behind many just graduated young people (or not even graduated) who knows all of these technologies and much more. This way, what differential would I have to guarantee a increasing budget and afford livelihood and quality of life to my family? What doors would I be able to open here in Brazil and maybe out there?

I even looked for some new opportunities, with kind of persistence, but my attempts failed. Later I realized that was not properly  failures, since they actually directly contributed to and important process of self-discovering.

I was already from a long time wishing to effectively studying something that I could add into my resumé as as Academic Education, this is, an MBA in Project Management or in IT Strategic Management, or a Master degree in Computer Science.

The MBA seemed to be interesting to open some doors in the short and medium terms, however I was not so sure whether it was what I would really enjoy studying, learning and, most of all, acting.

The Master degree, in turn, seemed to much better match my "geek" side, once it would lead me to a Computer Scientist's  field. While hearing some things about distributed systems, parallelism, high performance, etc., I used to frown and think about it as a real "rocket science", though this impression also attracted me when I considered the challenging aspect, at least challenging for me.

Meanwhile, something interrupted many plans, I was moved to Brasília, where I worked for 6 months (second semester of 2012) directly placed in the Executive Office of the President of Brazil! It was a very important experience, but very hard too, highly exhaustive, not only for me, but also for my wife and all my workmates who was also moved to there.

There, I got myself thinking about what I would want for my life, what I really wanted to invest in. I turned back to think about the alternatives of Master degree or technological researches by my own (I had already planned a complete schedule for 2013). At this moment, the MBA had already been discarded.

I attempted the Poscomp exam for Master selection. Went bad, really bad. But people say that everyone goes bad in this exam, being saved those who go "less bad". :)

I applied at PUCRS university but, in December, the result was negative, my name was not on the list.

Ok! Plan B: I kept studying hard the technological trends for software development area, following the whole plan that was already ready for the next 12 months. I came back to Ruby on Rails, Scala, e etc.

In February of 2013, though, the big surprise: The professor Luiz Gustavo, of PUCRS, called me and told me that there was a position for his research group, and asked me whether I was still interested in the Master degree. He gave me two days to reply, I pondered with my boss wife :) and decided to face the challenge!! One of the aspects that turned it hard to decide was the fact that my wife was already carrying our first son inside of her!! The Master degree would be tough, certainly it would have been better to have done it some years before, but maybe that was my very last opportunity! So I accepted!

At this very moment, the 90-degree turn started to happen!

At the first semester I almost died. Applied for six classes, shot everywhere, until I define the goals for my research, wrote a monograph about previous researches concerning the same subject area and didn't failed in accomplishing the 40-hours week at my job, despite it some times has caused me to leave the company at 10 p.m.

But I was enjoying it, A LOT!

I was graduated in Information Systems, not in Computer Science, for this reason I went so bad in the Poscomp exam and kept suffering after I had started the Master. But, incredible as it sounds, I was increasingly enjoying all that scary Math! Yes, the doubt disappeared, management studies would had not worked so nicely at that moment of my life, because I'm definitely a Geek!

In July, the little boy arrived! :)  Daddy's big guy, has provided incomparable happiness to our lives!!

The second semester was more soft in aspect of number of classes, but not in the content to study, besides that I studied a lot by my own outside the university in order to enhance my knowledge compared to the classmates from Computer Science. I learned a lot about C, C++, complexity of algorithms, high performance computing, etc. Also realized how much it was helpful to have worked for almost 10 years in the industry before starting the Master's. I dove even deeply in some particular topics (such as Heterogeneous Programming, Data Analysis and Machine Learning) and, I believe that at this moment, I finally started to consolidate my differential in something that I was passionate for and didn't know. It began to turn me into a Computer Scientist.

It is not necessary to still explain the reason the blog kept stopped for so long! :)

I was strongly attracted by a researcher/academic career, not purely academic (just writing papers and so on) but as those who really master a set of research fields, produce and communicate knowledge.

Currently, I'm at the second year of my Master degree, working hard (really hard), and with the mission to develop my research and dissertation, which basically consists of adding the MapReduce pattern to a DSL based on C for patterns oriented parallel and distributed programming (or something like this). :)

My sight of Computer Science and a CS career is completely different of what it was 2 years ago. Some friends has already told me: "The Master degree will a watershed in your life and career". It will, for sure!  It's so true that the plans for a PhD are going fast, and the glimpse of opportunities is very exciting (at least for me)! :)

Certainly such plans will imply "some inspiration and lots of transpiration" (Thomas Edison), and overcome big challenges. Don't know whether I can do it, but I won't give up without trying! By the way, life has been "killing a Lion each day"! And the coolest is that they are really dying! :)

It has also been very rewarding to realize the influence over many classmates and workmates, who have also given new steps toward improving and increasing competences and, finally, finding out what is going to afford a real professional realization! This is very rewarding! Maybe it is a pinch of the reward that someday I'm going to have in a classroom, while I teach really-mastered knowledges and influence much more people! Is it gonna be this way? Don't know, but I'll find out!