{ Gabriel Fontes }

Curriculum Vitae

Overview

My interests in computing include free software, distributed systems, software engineering, reproducibility, DevOps, CI/CD, and development tooling.

I started out with Linux, service hosting, programming, and design as a teenager, and have never stopped. I currently contribute to a few free software projects, some of them of my own creation. My technologies of choice nowadays include Rust, Haskell, Lua, PostgreSQL, Nix(OS), Docker, and Terraform.

Most of my professional experience consists of development processes, build systems, infrastructure, and backend development. I also have experience with UI/UX, as well as (web and graphical) design.

I’m working towards a Computer Science MSc degree at University of São Paulo’s Institute of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, under the Software Engineering Lab. My current research is around Software Sustainability in Open Source projects.

Outside of computing, I enjoy reading, playing the keyboard, snuggling with my pets, and speaking about things I’m passionate about. I love learning new things and teaching what I know to others.

Education

University of São Paulo (2020-present)

University of São Paulo is considered to be Brazil’s most prestigious university, and is frequently ranked the top university in Latin America. The computing degrees offered by the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Sciences are also top-ranking, being one of the best places to study computing in Latin America.

During my time here, I helped create and currently lead our Open Source & Free Software extracurricular group.

Masters: Computer Science and Computational Mathematics (2023-present)

I’m currently researching Software Sustainability in Open Source Software projects, hoping to contribute to how we currently understand best practices for successful, long-lived, self-sustaining OSS.

Bachelor: Computer Information Systems (2020-2022)

I’ve studied different areas in computing, and gained a lot of hard and soft skills. Subjects I’ve particularly enjoyed include Software Engineering, Software Testing, Databases, and Operating Systems.

I was a teaching assistant for a semester, on the Database Laboratory subject.

Industry experience

Magazine Luiza / Luizalabs (2024-present)

Magazine Luiza is a leading retail company group in Brazil. Its technology division, Luizalabs, generates technological innovation within the retail industry, and beyond.

Site Reliability Engineer (2024-present)

I’m currently working as an SRE within the team building an Object Storage (S3-like) solution for the newly released Magalu Cloud platform.

Zoocha (2023-2024)

Zoocha is a digital agency, specially focused on Drupal development. Drupal is something between a framework and a CMS, allowing for great extensibility and development experience, while letting final users intuitively manage content. Zoocha’s clients include government, universities, and private companies.

While Zoocha was a smaller company, it was my first time working within a dedicated DevOps team, and I learned a lot about task prioritization, organization, and processes.

DevOps Engineer (2023-2024)

As part of the DevOps team, I mainly tackled technical debt and supported developers with better tooling and practices, while simultaneously taking care of cloud operations and making sure everything was running smoothly.

Some of the work included improving developer tooling, migrating (chef-based) client infrastructure from AWS OpsWorks into Terraform-managed AWS SSM, and dealing with day-to-day operations.

U-Get (2020-2023)

U-Get is a startup that pioneered a computer vision-based vending machine system. The system is able to recognize and bill customers based on what they pick up from a vending spot (e.g. a fridge or locker), without any mechanical components other than some cameras and an electronic lock, avoiding complex (and expensive) mechanisms present in traditional vending machines.

Our team built our systems from the ground up - including mobile apps, fleet management and billing systems; leveraging Cloud of Things technologies.

DevOps Engineer (2020-2023)

I worked with cloud computing (AWS), declarative infrastructure (terraform), containers, deployments, CI/CD, databases; I’ve championed development cultural changes, moving everything over to more reproducible solutions, and leaded a shift to a working code review culture with shared ownership.

Freelance Developer (2020-2020)

I started off at U-Get by creating a management solution for a fleet of Android tablets. The MVP was a Python CLI (later re-written into a Rust Backend) that handled the entire lifecycle of our tablets.

EVAG

EVAG is a digital agency, focusing on WordPress and custom solutions for different clients, mostly politicians and activists.

Communication Intern (2020-2020)

A temporary job during Brazilian 2020 municipal elections, I’ve built campaign websites for multiple candidates. The job involved working closely together with the candidates, and making their requirements into actual websites in a very short timespan.

Open Source Experience

Flavours

Flavours is a command line tool I created to aid in managing and applying base16 color schemes to different programs a person uses. This allows for consistent theming that can be easily changed (after setting it up once), and works specially well for software with text-based configuration files. It is quite popular, with 450+ stars on GitHub.

Nix ecosystem

Nix is a build and deployment tool based on functional programming concepts, such as immutability. It allows for highly reproducible packaging, as well as fully declarative Linux systems through NixOS.

I’m a very active member in the community. Besides contributing with packages and modules, I’ve also created a couple relatively popular projects for the ecossystem:

Other contributions

As I prefer to use open source tools, I frequently hack on them to add a feature I want or fix a bug; usually upstream the results as PRs. Thanks to this, I know my way around codebases written on different languages.