We have an amazing team at Fetchly Labs, and the Fetchly Diary series is a great way to get to know them. This week the spotlight is on Henrique Vermelho from our engineering department! Henrique joined the Fetchly Engineering team about five months ago. He is passionate about building the most secure and highly efficient web and mobile applications with the team.
Tell us a bit about yourself, Henrique - Where are you from? What's it like in your city?
I'm 24 years old, I graduated a while back with a degree in computer science and I live in Rio De Janeiro. Rio is sort of this wild roller coaster ride all the time. One moment you're worried about getting mugged, but the next moment you are watching the prettiest sunset you've ever seen in your life. It can make for some quite exciting days. We also have the craziest weather with really hot summers and awesome nature all around.
How did you end up in the tech industry? Were you always involved in Tech, or did you transition from something else?
I grew up on video games. I learned my English through video games, staying on a computer for 9 hours a day and seven days a week on end. I was about 14 years old when I built my first computer, so it was set in stone way back then that I would work with something related to computers. It's been a long road, ten years in the making, but here I am.
A year before my undergrad, I made a website for a startup that my mother put up in biotech, and it took off from there. Soon after I got into college, I would always learn alongside my courses, which were really heavy in theoretical computer science. On the professional side, I was always supplementing it with material I was reading online and freelance gigs I got throughout my years in college. The main thing is that I was always involved with computers.
What's the most exciting part of working at Fetchly?
The most exciting part for me is having the opportunity to deal with International clients hands-on. I get to grow a lot, try my best to understand their needs, communicate what we've achieved so far and what we can achieve, suggest new components for them to add to their products and add value overall to them. This kind of hands-on contact that we have doesn't happen on all projects, but when it does, it's really gratifying.
The other thing I like about Fetchly is that we have a great range of technologies to work with. As a result of this range of technologies, I had the opportunity here to transition into the career I actually want to have. I originally was working with mainly frontend projects but that wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be five years from now. I want to be a backend developer.
I want to be in contact with infrastructure development, DevOps, and possibly even systems development. I knew I could migrate accordingly here in Fetchly, so I gradually took on more backend-oriented positions. Nowadays, I barely work with frontend development. I like that can pick out my paths here and grow accordingly.
If you could get an all-expenses paid trip to visit three countries worldwide, which would you choose and why?
I would definitely start with Canada. My dream is to live there and have a home base there. I could go skiing, piggyback to the United States a little bit, visit some deserts in Montana or Nevada, and then go back and ski some more. I really like Canada overall as a country.. I like the culture and their biomes, so Canada is the first.
Then somewhere in Europe like France. France is really nice. My favorite food in the world is cheese, so if I could go to somewhere like Normandy, I’d be able to have some authentic, unpasteurized cheeses, and that would be a trip I would never forget.
Finally, I'd go to Italy. It is a bit hard to choose because it's an all-expenses paid trip. I have to think about it more. So, the third one is a toss-up between Italy and Switzerland because if all expenses are paid, I need to carefully consider my options.
Tell us something about yourself that no one else knows.
That's tough because I'm often outspoken, but I can think of something people often get wrong about me. The common assumption about IT people is they are very much into superhero movies and comic books. In my case, that couldn't be further from the truth.
I'm not too fond of superhero movies or superhero comics at all. In fact, I have to explain this fact every time somebody brings up movies to me and they start talking about the Avengers or League of Legends. They don't get that I'm not really into it. So that's some disclaimer I wish I had plastered over my face.
We had a great time learning more about Henrique, his experiences, and his journey as a software engineer at Fetchly Labs. Project development is incomplete without a great team, which is why Fetchly provides a comfortable working environment that is culturally diverse and focuses on encouraging team members to become better versions of themselves. Check out our job openings at
Fetch.ly and
LinkedIn. We can't wait to meet you!
*This is not the official Fetchly opinion but the opinion of the writer who is employed by Fetchly*