Hi, I'm Rafael.
I currently live in Canoas, in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The story of my career began at 15, back when I still played Minecraft with my friends. I remember there was a mode that let you add custom textures to the game. My curiosity led me to dig through the game files to try to understand how everything worked. That's where the first signs of Rafael the programmer showed up. Making textures for the game looked simple, they were just collections of 16x16 pixel images, so I decided to make my own (modesty aside, they were really good). Then, as soon as I learned how to do that, I also started making YouTube videos to share them and let other people use what I had created. Back then all I had was a basic phone, no computer. I noticed the videos reached more people when I made a good thumbnail, and that got me studying design (still at 15). So the first “artworks” were made with the Photoshop Touch of the time. That's where Rafael the designer came from (little did I know how useful that skill would be just ahead). After more than a year of posting and refining all of this, I peaked at 150 thousand views and even made some money from YouTube and from downloads of the content I produced. But for some reason I set YouTube aside. Then came my time in the Brazilian Army, where I got to know the famous motto “Strong Arm, Helping Hand”. You could say it was a golden and very important phase for me. I learned things I carry and will always carry with me, like camaraderie, discipline, resilience, and planning to reach goals. While I was in the Army, my first mentor, an Officer at the time, helped me find a path into agency design work. That meant working from 8am to 5pm in the Army and then spending the evening creating designs for clients. It was a demanding period, and it helped me turn the Photoshop skills I had developed on my own into professional work. My agency experience is consolidated under Agência Okta, from March 2021 to April 2022. I worked on social media graphics and print materials, collaborated with a copywriter, and took designs through client approval. That work strengthened my understanding of design and helped me find my way into software development. With the help of my boss at the time, I also had the opportunity to build the Vasconcelos Agrícola catalog from requirements and Figma design through a Next.js website, Django REST API, and deployment. It was delivered through a separate freelance contract in October and November 2022. I still provide occasional maintenance through Agência Okta. At Infratoken, from May 2022 to April 2024, I progressed from Junior I to Mid-Level I across three roles. I worked on customer-facing tokenization products, tenant branding, and a shared component library. I then spent a year at InfoxHub, building vehicle-release, inspection, payment, and auction workflows. Alongside those roles, I worked as a freelance Lead Full-Stack Engineer on deScier from September 2023 to November 2025. I built scientific-publishing interfaces with Next.js and TypeScript, provisioned separate AWS environments with Terraform, and automated container builds and deployments. My most recent role was at Ambar, from May 2025 to September 2026. I built cooperative-lending workflows and covered the principal engineer's two-week leave after a one-hour handover. My work also included an AI sales assistant for UK estate agencies, voice interactions, a mobile field-operations app, and an internal MCP server. There, I had what was without a doubt the year of greatest learning and challenges in my life so far: an environment with colleagues from many different parts of the world, in different time zones, and on top of that in a language other than my own. Through continuous effort, humility, and applying the values I learned along the whole journey up to here, I've reached a high point today, with a proficiency far above where I started. In that environment, even when I didn't have all the words, I chose not to hide. I kept contributing, bringing ideas and trends from the AI world, learning to listen and to make myself understood. I led projects in that context, which forced me to grow fast, and every time I got stuck or lacked the right word, it became a lesson. I left Ambar with valuable experience and a clearer sense of the engineer I want to become. This whole journey started at 15, and my future is still being built every day. If you made it this far, know that .