About Me

I was in a lab, after graduating as a microbiologist.

I was working with butterflies, mice, zebra fish and other scientists. Wearing a white coat. But, while I enjoyed the work, I felt other things calling. Things that had nothing to do with science. I finally decided to leave that career behind because science work in Portugal is based on research scholarships that require exclusivity and, as I flirted with DJing, it became increasingly clear that my heart and mind were somewhere else. This happened in July 2013.

( There's a whole detour about my love of music and where it led me. I'll get to that.*)

Cut to September 2014, when my friends and I were organizing the first music-based film festival in Portugal (really!).

It was called Muvi Lisboa and it filled the historic Cinema São Jorge, which is also home to IndieLisboa, DocLisboa and MoteLX, with films about music, music videos, talks, concerts, DJ sets and parties.

We had a lot on our plate, and not a lot of money – that's how I ended up spending a whole month working on a website that tried to live up to the line-up of the festival we created, even though I had never developed or designed anything for the Web before. I used Wordpress. The end result was not bad, but I can't say that it was good either.

This was the spark for everything that happened afterwards: I took a Web Design & Interactive course, my professional life in these fields started and I’ve been crafting my way through since then.

I got my start at my third and fourth careers at Lisbon-based digital agencies Innovagency and Wingman.

(what about the second? read through until the end and remember I told you I really like music.)

I entered Innovagency as a web designer, doing UX/UI, and when I moved on to Wingman I had already become the creative front-end developer I am today.

I later went from junior to mid-level frontend developer as I passed through Opplane (a US startup), and landed first at Tamanna (a Kuwait startup) and then at Holisticon AG (a German consultancy).

As for my favourite tools: for Design I currently work with Figma, Balsamiq, MockFlow and Miro (in the past I also worked with Sketch, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop); for Frontend I use React, React Native, NextJS, Typescript, Javascript, CSS, HTML5, Framer-motion, Testing Library, Wordpress, Bootstrap, Kirby CMS, Flutter and Angular. I have a certification in Scrum, and I’m all about accessibility, Design Systems, and cool animations.

On this, my very own corner of the Internet, you can find some things that I designed and developed over the years.

Some are corporate projects I developed while I was employed by different companies (and you can guess there's a lot of work that I'm not able to show here, either for confidentiality reasons or because it was done in collaboration with other people – the things I show are those in which I worked alone, no one else's design or front end work is on display here).

Others are very personal designs (posters, flyers, logos or websites) that I did for myself, for community projects I was involved in or for friends.

I first developed and designed a website to showcase my work in 2015, using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This is that website: revamped. This time around I'm using NextJS, TypeScript, React and some Motion.

I hope you like it.

* Thank you for reading down this far.

So: about my love of music.

I was (and am) a music lover. Which one day I led me to decide to do a DJing workshop with vinyl – it was great btw. With my head in the clouds, I walked into one of my favourite bars in Lisbon and I showed them a piece of paper with a list of songs that I wrote down, an outline of a night where I would be the DJ. They let me do it – crazy idea –, I fell in love.

I performed as Phizz and generated some buzz. I worked a lot, all over Lisbon, especially in queer spaces, and for a while there was a small and lovely crowd following me around. These days I go more for the afternoons. I also play at weddings tailored for couples who avoid mainstream music, a duo with my friend Filipe, aka Castor Mateus, that we call casamentocool.

So is this what I called my second career? Maybe.

You can add producing events to that. I took a Marketing and Musical Production course, and I worked as event producer (Match-Attack, Portugal Festival Awards). Along with friends and fellow music aficionados, I opened a music PR company, Concertina, a music agency Pinuts, and a cultural cooperative FWD Coop (the one that organized MUVI, the festival I told you about).

I was one of the organizers of the 2019 edition of the Festival Feminista de Lisboa, for which, besides helping produce 80 events in the city, I also designed and developed the website (now unfortunately gone) and print communication.