Back to the Old Continent

“Your life begins where your comfort zone ends” (@elizabethN’s mother )

My time at SWAT ends just shy of four years, and I can truly say it has been the biggest, most wonderful and most amazing professional experience of my life. I joined swat as a small user group manager and I am leaving as an international speaker, OSS contributor and manager of a awesome user group.Time has knocked on my door, I’m no longer 20 and time is not waiting around for me, so its time to kick my life’s plan back into gear and proceed to the next steps. Working for SWAT with such incredible and inspiring people, enabled me to reach a very comfortable point in my career, to expand my network over the borders of Brazil, getting to know so many awesome people, literally from the US all the way around to the Philippines.

I was given a chance to challenge myself and follow in the lines of SWAT’s CEO, Jacques van Niekerk , an amazing leader who inspired me to always express myself when my area of expertise was the topic. And many other amazing co-workers, experienced in so many fields. My direct team in the Brazil office with experts minds in PHP, Architecture and UX kept me on my toes and I’m very grateful for working with all these professionals.But @ElizabethN ’s mom had it right from the beginning and I have decided its time to seek new challenges, become a small fish in a bigger pond once again and learn from so many other great minds out there. Brazil has a huge and wonderful PHP community, which I watched and helped grow over these years, but so much is happening outside and I want to immerse myself in these “new waters” to take that next professional step.

As of the end of this year, I will be taking my place at WEBclusive in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This is a huge and exciting step for me and my wife, but one that comes after much pondering and at a very good time, moving to outside of Brazil was a old plan of ours and Europe is the right place at the right time. Both a culturally amazing region and also a florishing PHP community with so many conferences and the epicenter of the latest developments in frameworks and the language.

I hope to be able to reach out and talk to so many of my European development buddies and hang out much more often with them and my US friends as well, for sure i will be bothering names like @skoop , @dragonbe , @lornajane , @derickr , @akrabat and @davidcoallier much more now, and that’s just to name a few.

Thank you SWAT team for these awesome years, and thank you to the Brazilian PHP Community, we have grown so much over the last years, I’m very proud of the work done by so many people, I can only hope this work keeps going and that I can help as much as possible from the outside.

Note: Why “back to the old continent”? Little known fact is that i’m a german citizen (by right not birth) and lived there for 3 years in my childhood.