I feel so old doing this, because on my teenager years it was very common to have a blog and, months or years without writing anything, we would make a post reviving the blog. So here it is, a new beginning for this one. This is a short update from the last 2 years.

I have recently moved to Germany for a Full Stack Developer position. I’m still getting used to this idea, because I now have 2.5 years of experience. Important to notice that, from this, 1 year was in management.

After my first year as a developer I received an offer to lead both teams that I had worked in the company that I was at the time. I had always enjoyed management and agile stuff, and that role was perfect for that. I was a people’s manager, but I also had a scrum master like role, managing the agile process in both teams and helping the Product Owners. It was a great job role to understand more about projects and the company as a whole, but I had to step down from coding so much. I still got some tasks to code, but I was missing the day to day problem solving.

At that time I was getting a lot of LinkedIn contacts, and some of them were to work on Europe. My wife and I were already thinking about moving from Brazil. We had a great life there, but mainly because of the political crisis the country is facing, we were not feeling home anymore. We were also expecting a baby, and that was not the culture we wanted for our son.

So one day I received a contact from a recruiter from a big Open Source company asking if I wanted to be part of their selection. The role was in Germany, in a city I knew little about, but I said yes. I passed through an interview with the manager and PO, and after that I had a pair programming coding challenge to solve an issue from one of their open source projects. I was very nervous, but I managed somehow to explain my thinking to them and, even if I couldn’t make a solution in the given time, they told me I could send a Pull Request to the project when I was done.

One week later I sent the PR, and after some comments from the team and some changes from my part, I received the call from the manager saying that they wanted me in the company! They agreed on waiting 4 months, because my baby was about to be born and that was the time he would need to be cleared for travel.

One week later our son was indeed born, a little premature and needing special health care because of it. My wife and I were split between making preparations for the moving and visiting our son in the ICU every day. After almost 3 months there, the doctors discovered that he had a problem in his bowels and needed a surgery. It all went well with the procedure, and he had a great recovery. But one week after, because of a complication with his central access, he had a cardiac failure and did not resist. Our lives also ended that day, in a sense…

After that, we just couldn’t stand being in Brazil anymore. We dived deep on the moving, finally bought the tickets as soon my visa was expedited, and one month later were arriving in Germany. And now we are here starting a new life, finding a new home and learning a lot of new things. We just wished our little one were with us and could see all the things that we are experiencing. Everything that we see here reminds us of him, the expectations and what we were going to teach him. But that’s life, fragile and unpredictable.