For the past 8 years I’ve been working as technical designer and UI programmer, helping many different enterprises build standardized tools and UI systems for their products. The experiences I have worked on often had a strong multiplayer component, ranging from Corporate VR “metaverses” to Arena shooters in the web3 space and battle-royale games.

Looking at what I’ve been doing, I find it funny that I ended up being a Technical Designer, since I didn’t even know it was a term when I got started, but in hindsight it was exactly what I was always meant to be. Just like anybody else who wants to join the industry, I wanted to be a game designer, but I also have a strong need for structure and, according to many people around me, I am an engineer at heart. The natural consequence for me was to find a niche where design skills were needed, but where I could build through code or visual scripting.

I just realized that you may not even know what a TD is! So, according to programmers we are more of designers, as we often do front-end and UX/UI work, but for the actual designers, we are programmers, as we use black magic to make stuff move! It is a weird position to be in, but I genuinely love it. I can talk to both worlds as one of their peers, and use my structure-craving mind to build beauty in an efficient way!

I know that this is a bit of a cliché, but I do travel a lot, and I often do that in what you’d consider unconventional ways.

I first got my taste of freedom back on 2012, when I did an InterRail trip with my best friend, going from Lisbon to Istanbul, passing through Normandy and even Copenhagen – all by train! After that, I attended and completed the “Mongol Rally” in 2017, curating a book about it that was used to collect money for charity. As if it wasn’t enough, I also attended the Crazy Italian Rally, in 2021. As you can see, I love the feeling of being out there, on the road in the middle of nowhere. I found out that driving for hours, not knowing where I was on a map, was way more liberating than I thought.

How can I travel this much, you wonder? I usually take little to no time off during the year and organize longer trips in summer. I take great pride in my work and I deeply care, which means that I also need a bit of time to put it at the back of my head when I go on vacation. This is why I do it once per year (or once every few years, it depends), I need to get into the mindset, and be open to discover new cultures, see new places, and most importantly, meet new people.

My last trip was a solo backpacking of 4 weeks in China, can you guess what’s next? Cause I really can’t!