A new beginning

I had never really understood the real reason to have a blog and write articles, until my good friend Leonardo França motivated me into creating this blog. Quickly I realized that because of the blog I begun once more to learn new stuff, mainly to be able to write new articles.

Very soon I dove deep into the topics I wrote about and from there talks and magazine articles soon came about, as was the case with AJAX. The blog became a meeting point for me and people who were interested on the topics discussed, and even with people who had taken some of my projects and gone even further with them, this and the repercussion of the blog were eye openers that showed me the important role publishing articles had in a web professional’s career.

Today every so often I’m questioned about how to achieve professional ascention, or how improve your current position, and I don’t even twitch before replying: “create a blog, publish your work, and just show up on the map, in a word, participate!”

And that gets me to another topic, “participating”. This is an extremelly important aspect of career building, in the last years I have activelly participated in the local PHP comunnity (Distrito Federal, Brazil and outside of Brazil whenever possible), besides working along with great representatives of the web 2.0 in Brazil, like BlogBlogs.

This active participation gets me to the topic of this post, “a new beginning”. Through various participations in the PHP community and other personal projects an incredible opportunity presented itself in the form of a job offer from Naspers, to work with their elite SWAT Team in MIH. This spot is amazing for a simple fact, working full time with incredible and unique challenges, much like what I do at home every night, and far from any other job opportunity i went through in the past.

So that’s why I’m now in São Paulo, the biggest commercial center in Brazil, and just about as much opposite of Brasilia as anything can be. Last week marked my first days at the new office and I’m already very excited with the prospects and wrapping my brain around the first challenges, as well as getting to know some other products of the worldwide team.

Thanks to all who made this possible!