Vilago

Rio de Janeiro, January 2003 – Current

Vilago is my own one-man consulting and hosting company. From my experience in the Brazilian weblog community I decided to start a small hosting business, first reselling space for bigger hosting companies and later with my own servers. The feedback for Vilago has been great, serving more than 100 customers with focus on customer care and personalized service. Since Vilago now has its own two dedicated servers I have to double as salesman and Unix sysadmin. Vilago doesn't have a motto as bold as Google's, but one I am proud of following: treat your customers as you would like to be treated.

Through Vilago I have worked on a couple of web projects as a consultant and created my own projects for fun and fame. Some include:

• Somasa – a traditional Content Management System developed from the ground up with Ruby on Rails. On this project I was convinced that Rails is so powerful that for these small-but-customized types of project you don't need a packaged CMS solution, you can quickly code exactly what your customer needs and nothing more.
• OPA!Cursos – client project for a investment training company. Built using Somasa's CMS as the base structure, then adding course registration capabilities.
• Cellbroker – client project for a mobile-based stock quotes service (I was only involved on the web part of the project). All business logic for this system is located outside the Ruby on Rails code, which means all models are webservice callers that interact with an outside server through Json (for smaller message size). The Rails app only has 1 database table, storing stock symbols. Everything else is sent to the business logic server.
• TopLinks – a weblog link crawler and indexer, that started from the idea of reverse-engineering Blogdex for the Portuguese-speaking bloggers. At its prime TopLinks indexed more than 5000 weblogs every day, but I eventually took it down in 2006 since it was consuming too much CPU on Vilago's servers and taking too much of my time for too little return.
• Projeto RSSficado – back in 2001, before Brazilian portals even knew what RSS was, a group of motivated hackers decided that instead of convincing each company to offer their content in the new format we should just go out and make HTML-scrappers to convert our favorite content to feeds. We gathered some attention and helped to popularize the new concept of content syndication in Brazil.

Visit: http://www.vilago.com.br/

Interconnection S/A

Rio de Janeiro, March 2004 – 2006

Interconnection was a development company, using software development best practices (strongly based on the Rational Unified Process) to create custom-made systems to companies like Prodesp (and its clients), Petrobras BR and Ipiranga.

My duties as Lead Sales Engineer included the first contact with clients for initial project design, development effort estimates, pricing and the first version of the Software Development Plan, including a candidate execution schedule. At project launch, being the person with most knowledge about the project at that point, I sometimes also doubled as Requisites Analyst during the inception phase.

Mars Hill Group

Winnipeg, October 2001 – April 2003

The Mars Hill Group is a New Media shop, designing and implementing Internet and multimedia projects for clients all over Canada.

I joined the company in October 2001 as Senior Systems Analyst, not only to help in the development of client projects, but also to bring new vision and methodology to the company. My experience in the web market was also used as a Sales Engineer Specialist, helping the Sales team with new ideas of projects to offer to clients, giving a technical perspective to the sales process.

My first big achievement at The Mars Hill Group was completely redesigning the company's CMS, Control Bridge, using the ColdFusion platform.

Visit: http://www.marshillgroup.com/

eMarketplaces International

New York City, Spring 2001

eMarketplaces was the leading provider of marketplace software and services to trade media and international trading companies in fragmented industries. Its software infrastructure was used to power B2B electronic marketplaces and, most importantly, to drive leads, liquidity and collaboration by proactively matching marketing products and projects to pre-qualified trade buyers. Unfortunately eMarketplaces investors decided to change their focus and the company closed its business in June 2001.

My position at eMarketplaces Internacional was Lead Developer, with responsibilities ranging from day-to-day development of EMX, the company’s product, using Macromedia ColdFusion, to overseeing all technical aspects of the company, including our servers in Taiwan (running Windows in Mandarin!).

RunTime Technologies

New York City, April 2000 – April 2001

Named one of New York Technologies Fast 50 for the year 2000, RunTime Technologies provides comprehensive web-based solutions that simplify the use of websites and related technologies to meet business communication and information management needs.

RunTime Technologies (formerly SOHOnet) develops websites using its proprietary knowledge management system, RunTime Siteware to a series of clients, including Chase, Compaq, Mobil and The New York New Media Association.

I joined RunTime Technologies as Junior Developer but in less than 3 months was promoted to Senior Developer, with my own production team, including 2 other developers and one intern. Among the senior developers I was chosen to be the “unofficial” Sales Engineer for the company, joining sales meetings to provide technical insight to proposals and sales engineer.

Visit: http://www.runtime.com/