Hello Pedro! Shed some light on your life’s journey.
I was born in Lisbon, September 3, 1996. I would've been too young to keep up with the advent of the internet properly were it not for my older brother. I was lucky enough to have a brother 8 years older than me. In practice, what this meant was that even when I was too young to understand by myself what was really happening behind the computer screen, my brother would always be there to explain it or show me the latest crazy things the computer could do: From burning music into CDs to playing the latest games on it. It may seem silly looking back now, but at the time it was indeed a wonderful age where often we'd find something new and fantastic on and off our screens.
Adding to this perfect setup was that my mother is a lawyer with her own small office in Lisbon- which needed to be outfitted with computers at the time, of course! And my father was helping set up a major American office supply retailer for the first time in Portugal and trying to convince everybody that they should sell more than office paper. They should sell computers and even gaming consoles! Adding to this, my mother's love for traveling meant we went out to foreign countries every summer and I got to see what was happening worldwide, too. So, pretty much everyone in our household was all in on the rise of the global internet, Web 1.0!
Despite this, I also grew up playing on the streets. Football, hide-and-seek, catch...you name it, we probably played it with the other neighborhood kids until it was dark outside and our mom called our names by the window -If she was using our whole names, we knew we were in for a stern talking! And then, back home after dinner, we'd browse all the web forums! So, growing up, I really did have the best of both worlds. I look back upon those times quite fondly.
To be completely honest, as a child, I never imagined myself working in IT. I'm not sure why. Perhaps the thought of making a living out of it had just never crossed my mind. There was also, I believe, a negative stereotype in my mind at the time that IT people were those guys who spent their whole lives in the basement and never got any sunlight. This, I later found out, was entirely incorrect. But at the time I wasn't too keen on being a vampire, you know?
The opportunity presented itself after I failed to get into my first university course pick (Biomedical Engineering), and got into Informatics Engineering instead. This "failure" opened so many doors for me that I’ll forever be grateful for my complete lack of talent for Biology that pulled my grades down during the exams. In the Informatics Engineering course at the University of Lisbon I met many people and made lots of friends who shared a somewhat similar background to mine- people who'd grown with the dawn of the internet. But perhaps more importantly, I met and made friends with people whose backgrounds differed vastly from mine. One of my best friends was a 60-year-old man who had worked on the hardware infrastructure that supported the early internet in Brazil. Those were some wild years- lots of work, projects, deliveries, exams, all-nighters studying... but we were all on the same boat and helped each other out.
What is your professional background?
My first professional experience was a bunch of freelance gigs I did during college. There was nothing particularly remarkable about most of them, but I did learn a lot because I did a little bit of everything here and there. I designed websites, SQL databases, etc. These helped me become a little bit more independent because, well, if there were something I didn't know how to do, I'd have to go and learn how to do it! I find this to be an important ability in the world of technology nowadays - I don't think anyone expects a person to know everything about every technology, but having the ability to deep dive and get your hands dirty to learn about a particular technology is rather essential.
These years were also important in particular because they taught me about soft skills and dealing with actual clients. It's not always easy, and it's definitely not something college prepares you for. A college project will often (hopefully) have clean and clear requisites to implement, but in the real world, this isn't always true.
Later, while I was working on my Master's thesis, which was about observability and the implementation of an SIEM, someone noticed me. That someone was António @AntonioSousa, one of our local resident DynaMights. He approached me, we talked, and he introduced me to the world of Dynatrace. Since then, I've been working at Marketware.
I've mentioned my luck before, which remains true in my professional environment. I sometimes still listen to my college mates telling stories about their first jobs—how they were stressful or meaningless jobs, etc. Well, this couldn't be further from the truth at MarketWare. From day one, I've been given every tool and every opportunity to learn more about Dynatrace and deep-dive further into the world of observability in a very sustainable and productive manner.
More importantly, we function like a tight little family that gets together daily to support each other and get the job done. That in itself makes it a comfy and productive working environment. On top of that, I also work with a second local resident, DynaMight, Pedro Deodato @PedroDeodato . In practice, this means that I’ll often slide my chair across the office to go poke and bother either Pedro, António, or David (another member of our Dynatrace group) whenever I'm having technical difficulties. I've been doing that a lot in the 6 months since I've been here, and, so far, they haven't removed the wheels from my chair! Great success ʘ‿ʘ
I've been able to learn a lot. I do a little bit of everything, but lately I've been deep diving into DQL for the new dashboards and OpenPipeline.
How does Dynatrace fit into the picture, and what was the biggest challenge Dynatrace helped you overcome?
I haven't been working with Dynatrace for long enough to have a big, big success story of overcoming challenges and making huge creative uses of the platform like the ones I've seen shared by some veterans around here!
But I did talk about how Dynatrace fit into my personal picture before, during the Success Story Community Challenge (I love browsing through these challenges). I've done quite a number of interesting things, from detecting processes that had been stuck for years to producing DNS Dashboards that highlighted query issues not previously detected or even used OpenPipeline to treat logs for several very specific cases. But really, the most significant challenge Dynatrace helped me overcome was a personal one. Without wanting to repeat myself, I can say that Dynatrace helped me find motivation and the original spark that led me into the field of Security and Observability for the first time. After my thesis project, I was pretty tired and wanted nothing to do with the field. Implementing observability had been a little nightmare of configurations, deployment of multiple different agents that didn't do all that I needed, server-client connection configurations, and crazy yamls back and forth... I had reached the conclusion that it was all too much and that I didn't want to work in this field of IT.
Then, Dynatrace showed up, and it changed my perspective. It isn't always simple, and it still has me banging my head against the wall sometimes (looking at you, DQL!), but observability once again became fun and enjoyable to implement. It takes effort and a little bit of patience with myself when I'm still figuring things out at first, but I can see the work I do having a real impact on our clients. How can I put this? What we do here, the effort we put in, matters. Whether it's because we figured out why an application wasn't working when nobody else could (all hail tracing!) or because we can detect ongoing issues in real-time, alert, and react accordingly due to the ability to do log ingestion and processing through OpenPipeline. There is seldom, if ever, a boring day at Marketware.
What makes Dynatrace Community important to you?
I first learned about the Community through António. It was one of the first things I was introduced to when I started learning Dynatrace, and it was made clear to me that it would be extremely helpful in my journey. I'll be the first to admit I had my doubts before joining. Mostly because I don't think I could appreciate just how amazing the community was before I actually started working with Dynatrace and taking part in the Community forums. In those early days, I embraced it with a healthy dose of skepticism, and I'm glad I did.
"The Community is part of my daily routine, and it has helped me immensely. First of all, it's a constant reminder that I'm not alone- my struggles, especially in the very beginning, have been someone else's struggles before."
I would search and see my questions already posted a couple of years ago by people who are now Dynamights. That in itself was somewhat encouraging. But then, as time passed, there was more. I began to notice there were sometimes questions there that I could actually provide an answer to. And after a while, I tried to do just that. I was a bit timid at first, but then I just kept going. Nowadays, like I said, it's part of my daily routine. Check for questions, interesting product ideas, hot topics, conversations happening, etc. There's always something going on! I don't always understand everything, but it's never boring. Sometimes, I find myself having to close the Community browser tab because I end up spending too much time browsing there instead of working 😅🤣
Meeting people from the Community at Innovate this year in Amsterdam was also genuinely fun. There are a lot of varied and interesting people working with Dynatrace, and getting to meet a bunch of them was quite a privilege. There were many, many people there, and I couldn't name them all. But shout out to Mike, who had to listen to me rambling about Extensions and reassure me about my worries regarding the 2.0 EF transition, and a big hat tip to Julius, who promptly allowed me to poke at his years of experience with Dynatrace and answered a bunch of my questions as well. Without the Community, none of this would have been possible. Dynatrace is a fantastic platform by itself, but I genuinely believe the Community breathes life and soul into Dynatrace by driving it further and turning it into an ever-evolving vision that pushes new boundaries every day.
Tell us something about you that most people don’t know. What is your biggest joy or passion in life?
Well, let's see... I guess I've been a Boy Scout for 17 years! I started when I was 11, in the little Timberwolves unit. I'm part of the Federation of Scouts of Europe, which is an international scouting organization. The international nature of the association has allowed me to camp all over Europe! From the forests of French Normandy to the picturesque hills of Italy, I've set up tents everywhere, and it really is a passion of mine. That being said, I am still deathly afraid of spiders 😱 Nowadays, I lead a unit of boys ranging from ages 12 to 17. I deal with a bunch of moody teenagers every week. Dynatrace struggles are nothing. 🤣 I also play the guitar. I started when I was around 14 because we thought it'd be fun to have one in the scouts unit, and I've been playing it ever since. Classical, mostly.
Sure thing! I don't really have a bucket list, but let's look at the facts about me.
🔹 I think cereal goes before milk. Pitchforks and torches to whoever disagrees!
🔹 I like most animals, but spiders make me very uncomfortable. That being said, I actively avoid killing them. Recently, I had one sleeping in my room with me, in a corner of the ceiling, and she kept dodging all my attempts to relocate her. So I named her Mathilda. She's been gone for a couple of days, though. I like to think she went home for Christmas. I kind of miss her now.
🔹 I'm a football fan! My club is Os Belenenses, from Portugal of course. You probably don't know it, likely because we haven't won the league title since 1946. Seems like this won't be our year either. Maybe next year, eh? 🥹
🔹 I speak 3 languages! Portuguese, Spanish and English. I can understand a lot of Italian and a bit of French, but speaking those is beyond me.
🔹 I'm a Linux fanboy, and I use it at work and at work. Pedro Deodato, working next to me, prefers MacOS. This proves even Dynamights can sometimes be confidently wrong.
🔹 I have two cats and had to baby-feed one of them for a while because she was so little when we found her. Sadly, despite this, they've both chosen my girlfriend as their preferred owner and hopped onto her lap instead of mine. I've become these creatures' spare employee/butler, but they're too adorable and cute to get mad at.
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