Joana Gomes@joanagomes

I started programming as soon as I learned how to read. Growing up with a ZX Spectrum 48k opened up a myriad of possibilities, and made me fall in love with technology, games and programming right from the start. But as the Spectrum started getting old, and in the lack of another system to work/play on, I moved to my other passion: the arts. Computers were left aside during most of my teenage years, up until I started my Product Design college degree. Working on 2D and 3D digital art, aside from hand drawing, while re-learning how to code, revived my passion for computers and technology. On my 4th year in college, I changed to a degree in Multimedia, which itself led me to an internship in games development at Spellcaster Studios Lda.. That's where my career started: coding, scripting, manipulating 3D scenes and 2D sprites. I worked with C/C++ and LUA on the software part, and 3D Studio Max and Adobe Photoshop on the digital arts part. After 4 years, the company's path took the wrong turn and it was forced to close down. That led me to a dutch digital TV solutions company, Divitel Development Lda., where I started working on systems integration and applications in several technologies, from Google's JAVA based frontend solution (Google Web Toolkit) to set-top-box software development, namely catch-up TV applications on browser-based environments. During the 5 years in the company, I also did several different tasks, like working on a video transcoding system to allow video calls between the elderly and health caregivers, using the set-top-box, the TV and a digital camera. In the past 3 years, I've been working as a consultant for nearshore and outsourcing companies, and thus grabbed pretty much any kind of front-end project you can think of, with several different tech stacks, from Ember.js to React.js + Redux.js, and glimpses of D3.js, Highcharts and other libraries along the way. Now and then I'd revisit my origins and build a small C/C++ project to aid with the current task, for generating huge loads of data for example, and I'm now learning Ruby on Rails as part of my integration in a new team and project, but also for personal development. On a recent project I worked as a team lead, project manager and product owner, all at once, being the proxy between each party and making sure the work was being done within requirements and budget and that everyone related was happy.In my free time, I'm a musician. I sing since I was 9 (more or less the same time when I started programming). I learned to play the flute when I was in college and now and then I pick up my MIDI keyboard or my acoustic guitar and try to learn a bit more. Music has always been in my central core, but I also love reading, playing video games, solving jigsaw puzzles, or any kind of mind teaser actually, and walking, swimming, riding my bike, travelling… I'm a very sociable person, although I appreciate my alone time very much. I live for today and make my best so that each day is as full as it can possibly be.