Turning 50 made me realize I haven’t just lived one life — I’ve lived through several different versions of the world.
Today I turn 50. Half a century.
Saying it out loud sounds like an eternity, but somehow, it feels like I just got here. I’ve been thinking a lot about how much the world has changed. Sometimes it feels like I haven’t just lived one life, but several different versions of the world.
I remember my dad’s absurd pride in his first cellphone (a literal brick!) and the car CD player he made sure everyone knew about. I survived the screech of late-night dial-up modems (waiting past midnight to pay for a single phone pulse), the “uh-oh!” of ICQ, and the true underground mafia of cassette tape copying. I spent hours on BitTorrent downloading movies that took weeks to arrive, and today I hold the entire world in my hand with Spotify and Netflix. I didn’t just watch technology change; I watched it completely rewrite how we connect and discover.
Because I chose tech as a career, I watched all of this from backstage. I went from the era of being on-call with a pager beeping on my belt in the middle of the night, to today’s 100% remote work. From saving code in a .ZIP file, to the cloud revolution, and now, to Artificial Intelligence.
Looking back, I feel an immense pride in having my hands on projects that truly changed the day-to-day life of my home country: the first Brazilian electronic voting machine, the revolution of Sabesp’s billing system (the TACE project), and Brazil’s very first banking transaction SMS system. At Globo.com, among so many projects, STORM was unforgettable — helping the company become the world’s first mainstream media outlet to offer 4K video on-demand.
In this rollercoaster of an industry, I reinvented myself, too. I started as a developer, moved into leadership as an Engineering Manager, took a step sideways into Product to truly understand the “why” behind what we build, and returned to Engineering until reaching my current seat as a Director. Each hat shaped my vision, which today focuses much more on people and strategy than just code. But no matter how much I’ve grown, one thing remains exactly the same: regardless of the title, I still see myself simply as just another team member — only with a different set of responsibilities.
And it wasn’t just screens and systems.
I was a kid during Brazil’s return to democracy. I survived the surreal inflation from the Cruzeiro all the way to the Real. I watched the Gulf War live on TV, looking like a bizarre green-tinted video game. I froze along with the rest of the office on 9/11, and heard the streets erupt in celebration over the death of Bin Laden. And, of course, I saw the world literally stop with the pandemic, locking us inside to live through something future generations will read about in history books.
In the midst of all this massive global history, my own messy story was happening. I got married. Got divorced. Married again. Divorced again. 😅 I packed up my life and started over from scratch in Australia. I watched my nephews be born and, in the blink of an eye, become adults. I saw the idols of my youth age right alongside me and had to say goodbye to legends like Andre Matos, Lemmy, Dio, Eddie Van Halen, and David Bowie. Losing these figures feels like losing little pieces of our own timeline.
Perhaps that’s the most reflective part of turning 50.
I think about the choices, the detours, and the hard times. I never liked seeing myself as a victim of bad situations. If something went wrong, I tried to learn what not to do.
It doesn’t mean everything happens for a reason; it just means I refuse to let bad experiences be useless. I might not be able to choose everything that happens to me, but I absolutely choose what I do with it.
When I put it all together — the pain, the wins, the people, the changes, and the lessons — I think: damn. Fifty years is a lot of living.
I definitely don’t have all the answers. I probably have more questions today than I did at 20. But I know who I am much better now. I care a lot less about who I “should” be and a lot more about simply enjoying the journey.
So, here we are. 50 years. Half a century.
A little older, hopefully a little wiser, definitely still a massive nerd, and deeply curious. Because, considering how many times the world completely flipped upside down in my first 50 years… I genuinely can’t wait to see how many more worlds I’ll get to discover in the next ones. ❤️️
Note: Written by a 50-year-old nerd, peer-reviewed by Gemini.