About me

Hello there,

I’m Odra — a software engineer from Brazil who took a one-way flight to Portugal and never quite got around to booking the return. These days I live in Porto, where the coffee is smaller and the rain is a lot more committed.

It all started with toys. Not playing with them, exactly — taking them apart to see what was inside, and then (usually) putting them back together. Some of them even worked afterwards. That itch to understand how things work, and to rebuild them a little better, never really went away.

From 2008 to 2012 my family ran a lan house — one of those Brazilian internet cafés full of humming computers and people who needed them to just work. It was my crash course in hardware, networks and customer support, all at once. Somewhere in the middle of it, in 2010, I wrote my first bits of code and realised I could build things out of nothing but text. That was it for me. In 2012 I enrolled in Information Systems at UFPB to turn the hobby into a profession.

What I really enjoy is building stuff that makes people’s lives a bit easier — sometimes with software, sometimes with hardware, ideally with both. Over the last nine-ish years that’s meant helping keep infrastructure standing during the Rio 2016 Olympics, writing embedded software for BMW vehicles, building a payments platform for 8,000+ clients a week, and, most recently, the backend that quietly finds you another seat when your flight decides it isn’t happening today. Mostly in Kotlin or Java, often in Python, and usually with a Kafka topic lurking somewhere nearby.

I like mentoring, I like code review that’s an actual conversation rather than a formality, and I still take things apart just to see how they work — the difference is that now they’re mostly distributed systems, and putting them back together is my job.

I think out loud in Portuguese, work in English, and I’m always up for a good chat about a problem worth solving. If you’d prefer the tidy, structured version of all this, it lives on my CV.