My name is Adenilson Cavalcanti, I’m always lurking in freenode using Savago nickname (in case you don’t known what is IRC, I guess you can just skip what comes next in this text).
My first contact with computers was back in 1989 with a second-hand apple II clone. They were quite common in Brazil back then, when thanks to some stupid government policy, it was forbidden to import any product that had a national equivalent (which means that a IBM PC XT 8088 was a dream at time).
After a few weeks playing with it (and damaging my brain with BASIC as also the eyes in an old CRT TV) I forgot this toy and moved to other things.
A few years later, I did the vocational high school in data processing and got hooked again. It was quite interesting to learn Pascal at time (in the 90′s, Borland Delphi was all the rage in Brazil).
During my under graduation in Engineering at USP (University of Sao Paulo), I focused in all math/statistical and computer related courses available. My companion at that time was a trustworthy HP 48G graphical calculator, where I used user/sysRPL to grok matrix, linear algebra and calculus. I think at about this time I decided that C and C++ where proper languages for ‘real’ programmers.
While in undergraduation, I did a 2 years research project coding in C++ for MS-Windows (1999-2001) a.k.a. ‘the dark ages’. After getting fed up of bugs, lack of documentation and no access to source code, I moved to Linux in 2001 and never came back. I think started by using KDE 1.9.x (my first Linux distro was Conectiva 6, now known as Mandriva).
The MSc was about computer vision, signal processing and pattern recognition, nifty stuff not sure how useful in real world though. At 2006 I moved to Manaus/Brazil to work for (guess what!?) Mandriva. Later, I worked as a researcher for INdT (Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia) for five years, working with python, C and C++ in both maemo and Symbian/S60 platforms.
As any hacker, I have some pet projects, like amora (YARC: yet another remote control) and libgcal (a C library for gcalendar and contacts) and cellardoor (a wine app).
From 2009 to 2010, I contributed to KDE, being focused in 2 areas: kdepim and plasma. Next, got started hacking on WebKit in 2011 and Blink in 2013 (I’m a committer in both projects).
Currently I’m living in the Bay Area (California).