Endeavors, jobs and business
Usually people have been asking the reasons some of us, like me, used to negotiate wages or job conditions which hardly are they compatible with their viewpoint.
People usually link higher wages to having a master’s degree or Ph.D. focused on analytics, statistics, Artificial Intelligence degree or related courses. Others argue that long enterprise experience is mandatory.
TL;DR
I am keen on the fact that my experiences in startups and corporate are valuable once I dealt with a great deal of business sectors, sometimes helping then solve specific inter-departmental issues or most often, general business issues through the technology. I love to learn and guide people to success. I deploy. Period.
Long Version
When I was awarded in 2002, an opportunity arose and was related to my own developed product. Then I was challenged to turn the product real, from its conception to its market release. So, at the company I was working on, I was able to justify and create a division to make the product viable and put it to the market. Also, I was able to raise private and public funds for this long-term project, and got used to terms as CAPEX, OPEX (O&M) and so on. Consequently, not only did I manage the project but I also worked as a programmer, hardware integrator, and projected the API to link it to the needed vendors components. The Velaqua was finally born.
Velaqua is a system that measures the performance of top swimmers by acquiring data such velocity, space and video, synchronizing all of them to be analyzed by a bio-mechanic and/or a high performance coach.
It was not a straightforward process, nor a continuous and “fair conditions” project. When the first prototype was almost ready to get wet in the pool, our laboratory and other offices of the IES – Incubadora de Empresas de Santos, was invaded and stolen. The robbers took all equipment, computers and even some furniture with papers containing documents and designs. By this time, most backup solutions were local. And the information was gone.
Having valuable support from my staff and friends, we restarted from scratch. It demanded three extra years to finish the product and develop new and simpler services. With less than a half of the original budget, we reshaped completely the original design and software proposals. When the product was finally ready, the time to market was gone. In 2007, Brazil held the Pan American Games. The Velaqua and its services were focused on high-performance swimmers, specifically those who take part in the ultimate competitions such as the World Championships and the Olympic Games. We made our way to our ultimate goal around 2010. With no sell in the forecast, even considering that the Olympic Games were already known to take place in Rio de Janeiro, 2016, nor government nor the swimming agencies did buy the product or related services.
Finally, in 2014, the telephone rang. It was not another respected Research Institution interested in our results and protocols. It was actually a customer. Having the technical division regrouped in a 4-months long task force to deploy not a prototype, we build and deployed the unit number one to one of the biggest Brazilian sports club. This was mostly used to generate data to Aquatic Marathon swimmers.
One year after the product acquisition, the sports club decided to halt the investment on the product once it had lost some of its key swimmers. The product still worked for another year without the required maintenance.
Entrepreneurship
I had been an entrepreneur since 1997 when I was still underage and I was emancipated by my parents to legally take part and be a company’s partner, what I did with my step-brother to establish the Infotech Informática at Santos, company which running until today (2019).
After my graduation at the university, my vision for the company’s future changed. Influenced by the prize I was awarded in 2002 and the influence of some published papers I have published in local symposiums at that time did touched me. My course conclusion work was a low-cost system to control low-range solid-fuel rockets. One of the goals was to drive them to clouds that could result in hail rains. Hail rains have devastating results for agriculture. The purpose would be helping local farmers better protect their harvest from such storms. This project started before the 2000s and I need to confess that it was mostly for fun. It was also way easier to launch prototypes from the beach in the direction of the sea without issues … until 9/11. Then the process was forcingly pivoted to a “bit” more formal one. My team and I went to ITA – Instituto de Tecnologia Aeronautica, most specifically, the IAE – Instituto de Aeronautica e Espaço, “the Brazilian NASA”, to know and make use of some procedures in order to conclude our project.
Rocketry
I was lured to rocketry since I was a college student at the CEFET – Sao Paulo, the Federal Institute of Technology, where I studied Industrial Automation from 1994-1997. After implementing a Alcohol-fueled turbine, design inspired by my fathers’ mathematics teacher at Sao Paulo, Prof. Agnaldo Prandini Ricieri, it was possible going further with small experiments in this subject. I was able to build the unit when I worked at Usiminas, where I took my co-op. Even using second-hand material, the turbine was able to break Mach-2, statically. It could be verifiable by the Pitot tubes, sound and the color of the flames.
Going back to 2003-2005, a vision change is something deep and have a huge impact on your career. The goals changed from a hardware-based business to a software based business, perhaps having some hardware to support them., Then I was able to create a spin-off department focused on the software development mainly dedicated to develop the Velaqua product, for swimmers. Meanwhile, we expanded the Infotech support for medium and big companies through regional partnerships, getting customers as big as CPFL – CPFL3 in Bovespa – supporting their printers and drivers; the Santos City Hall by helping a GISS software by providing programmers and some contracts related to servers; FIESP – The Sao Paulo State Industry Federation to name a few.
I also archtected and made desktop systems to small and medium sized Transportation companies, Medical Clinics, Sales Control and Importers, all of them having invoice and financial controls.
So I prepared myself to submit a project to FAPESP, the biggest Brazilian development agency, having myself as the project coordinator. It is a role normally taken by masters and PhDs. To prepare myself in demands related to projects, I learned how work with integration-related tasks and the general ability of taking the obstructions out of the staff and to allow then to finish their job (scrum). In order to reinforce the knowledge out of the tech-stack, I did some extension courses and consultancies.
I also became a Delphi 2005 specialist, dealt with low power electronics, microcontrollers and its assembly and C programs, and remembered some proceedings from when I was an industrial intern, between 1996 and 1997, focused on my graduation in Industrial Automation in CEFET – Federal Centre of Technological Education. This was very useful for building the submerse portion of Velaqua hardware, as well as prepare business plan, general and specific budgets, prepare media material and, of course, even the website.
At 2008, I had the opportunity of get chosen by FINEP to wrap-up the Velaqua project, that granted us to define the concept, validate the product and be ready to build the first unit. To reach the goal, I learned more and more Linux, OpenCV API and existing vendors for video processing. In the end, I designed and contracted a vendor specialized in Artificial Intelligence and video processing to finish the visual underwater swimmer detection component and the intelligent module. I stand in charge of integration, APIs, databases and electronics.
A disadvantage during all the research cycle was that the financing just covers costs directly related to the project, but the office and expenses of everyday were not. So while the team worked with the main project, I have taken a side job in the Port of Santos, the biggest harbour of South America.
It was my first time preparing the processes and conduction the job of a team of 35 workers, from electricians to telecommunication and software PhDs. My team and I also helped to establish a engineering company locally for the purpose of running a full division to handle the Port of Santos Authority, their customer. The technician team was responsible for the service level agreement – SLA – and maintain all the ISPS Code systems running 24/7, and preparing some system improvements, both related to software and hardware. The software team, the one where we set aside the programmers, PhDs and high skilled Oracle and Informix DBAs, responsible for the Core system running C++ and firmwares, IT infrastructure and facilities as well, such as the access control system redesign, custom supervisory system redesign, including the first Brazilian implementation of the video compression protocol H264 on large scale ports.
The project was concluded on the company’s scheduled time and this side project occurred between 2008 and 2010. The main points of the technologies were the software written in C for the access control devices and the supervisory system written mostly in pure C++, having connections to Informix and Oracle Databases, Java-based systems, synchronizing video signal crossing relevant data in real time to become the Harbor Guard and Marshalls take decisions about local and national security issues. There were a bunch of support systems for the field team and project management. Here we chose among others, TrackIt! for remedy and BaseCamp.
Between 2012 and 2015 I had the insanely great experience of being part of the Tuilux team, where I got familiar to bigdata-related technologies and services. At that time, Tuilux was a relevant Brazilian Recommendation System provider. However, it lacked market traction, what made they been invested by a Brazilian fund called Astella. The negotiation was remarkable and one of the terms they asked was discontinuing the Tuilux Recommendation System and start a media-focused product. So we defined the pŕoduct and we called it TTV, which is a short for Tuilux TV. So I pivoted all the infrastructure developed under the AWS and prepared a scalable framework to process TV ratings through the social networks, focused on Twitter and Facebook. I worked personally with high-capacity and parallel production Linux Servers for the first time. My luck was they were using Ubuntu Servers, what made easier the task at that time. The team was composed of doctors, post-doctors, two masters, Senior DBA, programmers and some contributors when I arrived. On the other hand, at that moment I had never seen NoSQL databases nor Hadoop or Mapreduce or text processing techniques.
From 2012 we applied the lean and MVP – minimum viable product – concepts focused on innovative and disruptive products and services.
Thanks to the chief scientist, a comprehensive list of design patterns were disclosed and I could take the responsibility and became accountable in a fast pace. Other great contribution came from the Tuilux CEO, that helped me to improve providing key points for a C-level manager as well as learning higher-level hierarchy duties, such high-skilled team management, that allowed us develop not only an audience measurement system but also a sentiment analysis in Portuguese totally customer-focused. The main language was Java EE over frameworks like Spring and Hibernate, DynamoDB and MongoDB databases and again, I was in charge of integration against vendors APIs, REST services, cloud connection to get their files and further methods to keep the systems running.
Considering the valuable investors network our team abilities, we got valuable clients, from Brazil’s top 10 media agencies to mainstream television broadcasters.
Once Twitter and Facebook decided change their Term of Service and try to brave Brazilian market without local technological partners but IBOPE, we stopped the services we are providing at that time, and we put an end to the amazing Tuilux journey by the end of 2014.
Besides all this history, my partners and I, main employees and contractors (when applied) were trained to get things really done. There is another, less polite expression for that as well, assembler-level.
I believe that we were maybe in wrong circumstances and away from North America.
I decided to return to the job market as an IT Consultant. My experience, from industry to software companies gave me the ability to simplify business processes and software, reducing costs or easing the expansion plans. From 2015 I start a new phase to keep in touch with new corporate problems and solutions. There are some sectors that I would work for. One of them is telecommunications. It is fast-paced, usually are updated with latest technologies, is fast-paced , it has usually good budget for development, is relevant and frequently has room to improve.
Then I started working in a telecommunications company called Nextel. The company had a keen interest in improving operational controls, start using cloud solutions in Engineering department and reduce the vendors costs at that time, what drove me to implement a Java and Perl-made parser for PCRF dump, crossed other IT data and helped to run the new Usage Quality Management team and its KQI – Key Quality Indicators. It was focused on customers, anticipating customer complaints. A single issue could affect alone from 2.000 to 35.000 customers. The tools available for solving existing problems was quite wide: Google Application Engine, Google BigQuery and AWS tools were useful. However, although the company has grown this 3G/4G customer basis, it got further challenges through 2015 and 2016 and stopped most projects.
Coincidentally, by the end of 2015, the biomechanic of the Olympic Brazilian Team called me again to adjust and acquire field data for swimmers focused on the 2016 Brazil’s Olympic games. It resulted in a total replacement of the Microchip PICs, minimization of the sensors and full review of the underwater camera systems and converters. The swimmers analysis were usually taken during weekends, when they trained for the full length the marathons. Bigdata techniques used in recent projects were used in this system update, and the marathon swimmers obtained good result at the Olympic Games. I felt really amazed in having contributed somehow with data and analytics to the head coaches and swimmers.
As soon as I started to study better Bitcoin, Blockchain and the financial market and to practice Big Data tools and solutions, I landed into Axondata, a Artificial Intelligence Startup in Sao Paulo, as a Consultant Engineer. It was the beginning of 2016, when my wife and I just decided to move to Canada, mostly due to the skyrocketing violence and challenging local environment. So, my 1-year contract would be help then to design, improve and make available the backend and the first front-end of the AI modeller, easing the Proof of Concepts implementation, as well as improving it to define a product, they call SOMMA, an analytic tool which uses local, cloud and special computing techniques to solve user problems. It was backed by Python, Java, SQL and NoSQL databases among other technologies, mostly running in AWS, but also communicating with GCP.
Moved to Canada in September, 2016.
To be continued …