From servers to Elixir: what 12 years taught me
I started in 2013 writing real-estate software in Visual Basic and administering Windows Servers. Today I build Elixir/Phoenix backends and React frontends for Boulevard. The stack changed completely. The lessons compounded.
Lesson 1: ops roots make you a calmer engineer
Five years running infrastructure teaches you that every abstraction leaks at 3am. Virtualization, firewalls, databases, internal tools: when you have carried the pager for all of it, you design differently. Status tracking, failure handling, rollback paths. My migration tooling work years later came straight from those instincts.
Lesson 2: leadership is sequencing, not authority
As a Tech Lead, the highest-leverage skill was not the code I wrote. It was breaking ambiguous projects into sequenced work, running honest technical discussions with clients, and keeping a multidisciplinary team unblocked. Initiative leadership means the same thing as an individual contributor: clarify, prioritize, guide decisions, help others move.
Lesson 3: breadth first, then depth that matters
React, React Native, Angular, Kotlin, PHP, Django, Node, Elixir. Consulting across fintech, retail, and SaaS forced breadth. But breadth only pays when it converts into depth where it counts: today that is Elixir on the backend and React on the frontend, with enough surrounding context to debug across any boundary.
Lesson 4: community keeps you honest
Running GDG Sete Lagoas talks while working full-time taught me to explain things simply or not at all. If you cannot teach it at a meetup, you probably do not understand it yet.
The through-line
Every role rewarded the same habits: own the problem past your job description, prevent the second occurrence, and leave the team stronger. Stacks come and go. Those stay.