Hello Tomás! Shed some light on your life’s journey.
Like many others of my generation in this industry, I was introduced to technology through video games. At 3 years old I was walking around with a Nintendo Gameboy in my hands, helping my older kindergarten classmates beat levels they couldn't manage on their own. Since then, I have always had a proverbial GameBoy in my hands, so much so that it ended up becoming my job!
As a child, I did really well in school, and I always had a particular knack for STEM courses, which led me to study mathematics at university. At the time, I was planning on pursuing a PhD, but towards the end of my Master's degree, I started to realize that was not really what I wanted to do. During my teenage years, I had spent some time learning Python, exploring all sorts of Linux distributions, and just generally playing around with computers. It was something I really enjoyed, so I started applying for jobs in IT and landed at Dynatrace! After graduating from university in the summer of 2022, I started in Dynatrace as a Services Consultant, where I had the opportunity to work directly with customers who were using Dynatrace in their organization and eventually moved into the Extensions team, where I am today.
Tell us about your work and what interesting things you’re working on.
At Dynatrace, I work as an Extensions Consultant, meaning I am both responsible for building, maintaining, and improving the extensions that we have on the Dynatrace Hub as well as building ad-hoc custom extensions whenever our customers have special requests.
The world of IT is very vast, and with so many technologies available, there are bound to be use cases that Dynatrace won't address right away. This is where extensions come in - shedding the light of observability into unexplored corners of your IT environment. If you ever find yourself in need of monitoring something Dynatrace doesn't yet support, I might be the one helping you out 😉
Recently, I have had the opportunity to participate in an initiative to build integrations with several Application Security products. The Snyk and Tenable integrations were recently released, and there are a couple more on the way! If you are looking to bring all your security data into a single platform, the future is looking bright!
What makes you excited about being a part of the Dynatrace?
The cool thing about working at Dynatrace is that you get exposed to all corners of the IT space. I have had the opportunity to interact with people from all sorts of industries, from government to retail, from insurance to finance, and everything in between. Everyone needs monitoring! And with such a wide variety of customers, there is a constant stream of challenges and lessons to be learned -- no two customers are the same, be in terms of technologies that they use or the way they use them. Being part of the Extensions team means providing solutions to all sorts of unique and unusual use cases that our customers have. You never really know what your next challenge might be!
What makes Dynatrace Community important to you?
Everyone who works in software knows: try as you might, as a developer you will never be able to anticipate how users will interact with your software.
"The Community is the place where you can bridge that gap, and I find it invaluable to understand how people use the platform and what sort of problems they run into. It allows us to continuously improve our product and maintain healthy communication with our customers."
I also really like the feeling of community (no pun intended) that our forums have, where people are not just a username on the screen (as is so often the case in today's internet), but rather someone you know and interact with on a regular basis.
To anyone who is just getting started -- don't be afraid to ask questions! Everyone starts somewhere, and we are all here to help 🙂
Tell us something about you that most people don’t know. What is your biggest joy or passion in life?
I would say that I have two main hobbies -- learning languages and playing piano.
I grew up in a bilingual family (Portuguese/Dutch) and I've been fascinated with languages ever since I was a child. Growing up in Portugal I spoke mostly Portuguese, but my Dutch is definitely passable, and I try to practice it whenever I visit family in the Netherlands. During my teenage years, I dabbled a bit with French, German, Spanish, and Norwegian, but I have forgotten most of my French and German by now, while Spanish and Norwegian I sort of get for free from the other languages I know. It wasn't until I moved to Sweden that I really started dedicating a lot of time to languages. I've been living here for nearly 4 years now, so my Swedish is already fluent, and at the beginning of 2022, I also picked up Chinese, which I've since gotten pretty good at.
Today, I feel really confident in 3 languages: Portuguese, English, and Swedish, and I am varying degrees of passable in 3 more: Dutch, Chinese, and Spanish. And who knows, I might be looking at a 7th language soon!
I have always had a big interest in music as well. My dad plays the piano, so we had a piano at home, which I have been hammering since birth. At 5 or 6 years old, I started learning a bit more seriously, and then at 8 years old, I picked up the violin, which I played all the way until college. I haven't played violin in a long time, unfortunately, but I have kept up my piano playing! In recent years I pivoted my classical piano upbringing to jazz and have been having a ton of fun with it -- it's a whole different experience from classical music and I really enjoy how dynamic it can be and how free you are to express yourself.
Apart from these two, as I alluded to in the beginning, I used to be very big on video games, but nowadays, I don't really get around to it that much, as I just don't seem to have the time.
I have never been one to make big plans for the future. Someone once told me that "we might have plans for life, but life has other plans for us", and the more I go through life, the more this resonates with me.
In any case, one thing that is definitely on my bucket list is to travel more. I will be leaving Europe for the first time later this month when I go to China (good thing I learned Chinese😅) and Japan, and I really hope in the coming years to see more of the world and experience different cultures and ways of life.
What achievement are you most proud of?
As is probably obvious from my post history in the Community, I am currently the lead developer for the Oracle Database extension, which is one of the bigger extensions we have on the Hub (I am sure most people in this industry have come across Oracle DB at some point or another in their careers). In the summer of 2024, there was a big effort to release support for Oracle Database RAC, a database clustering deployment mode which quite a few customers were using. There was quite a lot of pressure on this since it was such a high-profile extension, but after one or two months of a lot of effort, ingenuity, and teamwork, we managed to pull through and add Oracle DB RAC to our list of compatible technologies!
If you have any questions or feedback about the Oracle Database extension, I’m your man!
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