About
My name is Ernesto Matos. I’m a Computer Scientist/Software Engineer living in São Paulo, Brazil. I got a MSc and a Ph.D in computer science during my time at DIMAp/UFRN (and HHU in Düsseldorf for a year). During my time in academia I did research on software testing and formal methods.
I’m currently working as an Software Engineer Engineering Manager at Loggi
trying to reinvent logistics through technology.
Long Bio
I got my first computer in 1996 when I was nine years old. It was an Intel Pentium III with 128Mb of RAM and fewer megabytes of storage than today’s free Google Drive plan. It had a cool turbo button, though :-).
Since then, I’ve spent more time in front of a computer than my parents should allow. In the beginning, it was just for games and learning cool tricks on MS-DOS. It wasn’t until late in school that I got a taste of programming. Some friends and I found out about free web hosting and started to code Dragon Ball Z fan sites. The sites had visitor counters, and we competed to see who would get more visitors. I don’t think the concept of SEO was popular back then, so we did our own marketing by setting the default website in the browsers of the school computers as our websites. The teachers weren’t happy, except for the ones that liked Dragon Ball Z.
When the time came to choose a college course, picking Computer Science was a no-brainer. I didn’t know what to expect from the course at first. I was pretty good in the programming and algorithm subjects, but the math ones were a little scary in the beginning. In the end, I was able to graduate with good grades. Also, since I was good at programming, I got a software developer internship in a local company during my third semester. I also helped to start a “college company” that developed some web applications for things like college events and registration pages.
During my time in college, I was a tutor for some programming courses, so my professors advised me to pursue a professor career. I liked to teach stuff to other people and enjoyed the research I was doing when I was writing my final dissertation, so this sounded like good advice. With that in mind, I decided to move to another city and get a master’s degree.
In the end, I got a master’s and a Ph.D. in Systems and Computing with an emphasis on software testing and verification. I got the opportunity to live in Germany for a year and do research. I always tried to keep my research as practical as possible and developed tools that put the theory I was working on into practice. By the time I finished my Ph.D. I came to the conclusion that I liked to study the theoretical stuff but what I really loved was solving real problems with code and engineering.
So I decided that a professor’s career was not for me and started to look for software engineering jobs. The switch was not easy. Unfortunately, most people in Brazilian companies don’t see much value in academic titles. It felt like I was starting from scratch, but I don’t regret making the switch :-)
I moved back to my hometown and got a software engineering job at Gocase. There I developed back-office applications using Ruby on Rails. After a year of working there, I started looking for bigger challenges. It was nice being closer to family again, but there were not many good opportunities in my hometown, so I decided to move to São Paulo which is probably the biggest tech hub in Latin America.
My first job here was at Bluesoft developing an e-commerce platform that was easily integrated into the company’s main product which was a cloud ERP for medium and large retailers. I also worked on other projects, but this was the most important one. I had the opportunity to work with a lot of cool and smart people. My work was also recognized by my peers and I got promoted three times in two years. It was also the first time I was given the opportunity to work as a tech lead.
After two years I thought it was time to move on to a bigger company and I decided to join Loggi. The company has the huge challenge of providing logistics services in a country that has a continental size. To solve this challenge there is a lot of technology involved. I joined the company when it had less than a thousand employees and when it had just got its unicorn title. So far I saw it grow to four thousand employees and be valued at 2 billion dollars.
Today I work as an Engineering Manager in the Platform team, a team that I had the opportunity to create and see grow. We work on tools that increase engineering productivity, reliability of our platform, among other things.
That is all for now. Hopefully, I’ll keep this page updated as new things happen in my life :-)