Hi, welcome to Spiral Code. I’m Adriano Mourão, and I’m going to write about algorithms, machine learning, math, hardware, music, art, animal rights, and any other thing that comes to my mind. This blog is going to be an open space where I’ll mainly focus on personal interests. However, I still consider writing about my professional life and professional topics as long-term goals.
About me
I’ve been enthusiastic about computers, technology, and games since I was a kid. Watching my father installing Linux on an i386 machine that I got for my seventh birthday has influenced me for my whole life. The funny part is that he only installed Linux because it came with Quake pre-installed, and I was crazy about it. The movie Hackers (1995) had an essential role in building my imagination around computers as well. It is funny to watch it today. The content of the movie is dubious, but the emotional part is still there. Somehow, nowadays, I am as excited about those things as I was when I was a kid.
It influenced me to learn some bash commands, basic concepts about operating systems, microcontrollers, assembly, and the foundations of the C programming language. Nothing serious until I got into the university, but enough to arouse an endless curiosity.
My interests are not limited to computers and programming. Actually, in my teens, I thought I would be a musician. Fortunately, I realized that I didn’t have a flair for it before it was too late. Not soon enough to prevent me from leaving school on a second plan for a while. But, at least, soon enough to not let me waste my time trying to become a pro, in what, for sure, I would undoubtedly fail terribly. Being bad at it didn’t make it stop being important to me. Music has had and will always have a vital role in my life.
Animal rights are also a big thing to me. I don’t think preaching is effective, but I would like to discuss this subject further in the future.
My professional life
I’m currently a Software Development Engineer at Amazon. I started my career as a QA Engineer at Cadence Design Systems in their Formal Verification team. After that, I worked at Accenture as a Machine Learning Software Engineer developing a Deep Learning-based Computer Vision platform from scratch. My previous experience was as an R&D Software Engineer at Instituto de Pesquisas Eldorado, where I worked developing camera systems software for Android smartphones.
As you can see, my professional experience is quite heterogeneous. I won’t say it was a linear and clean path; I had some stumbles. It also wasn’t effective for climbing the software engineering hierarchy. However, I’m sure I’m where I wanted to be now. It gave me a lot of knowledge, a solid foundation, and a lot of experience to share through this blog.
Feedback
Any feedback about the content of this blog is welcome. Tell me your thoughts about it, what could make it better, if you like or dislike a post, or what subject you would like to read here. There are always things that could get better, and I am open to criticism.