Now
Life
I'm more adjusted to being back in Rio (or at least I believe so). My body seems to have befriended all the new germs and mosquitoes (vaccines also helped). And it has been almost a sick-free year for the family.
I finally established (or more like pushed myself through it) strength and high-intensity practice. It has been over 6 months. I still dislike most minutes of it. Some days are harder than others. A podcast usually helps.
I was naive to conclude that apartment renovations and fixes were done! Issues keep coming back like a boomerang, and it's all because last year's work wasn't done with quality, which is sadly the standard in residential construction in Rio (maybe Brazil?). I'm still managing to stay productive (or maybe just busy), probably as an escape from all the noise.
Supervised software and Mameluca (my side coffee roasting project) are keeping the product-design side of me alive. Having the time to dedicate to them has been a great source of joy and energy. And they generate additional income, which feels good.
Making
Every thing! No thing! That’s how it feels to use the superpowers of LLMs to execute on ideas. I’m all in on exploring whatever idea sparks joy in my mind, even if building it makes clear that, like in a dream, not all ideas make sense outside of it. It feels like LLM software unlocks a higher fidelity of ideas on a napkin.
Supervised (my music project\band\never know how to label it) evolved into a music + software project. Felt quite natural to do that as I started to focus more on exploring music\audio tools.
- Shipped CHPTR, a browser-based creative instrument that turns videos into audiovisual art. And shipped my first paid app: Rondo, a looper and sustainer with a rolling 60-second memory that's always recording. I guess I'm an indie design-dev now? Feels empowering.
I'm back to writing more! Or something like that. Three new posts published on blog and more in the works. Starting to feel like I can keep a consistent pace.
Phase 1 of resurrecting an older (2000s) musical project with a friend progressed well, and it has been refreshing, exciting, amazing to listen to 20-year-old songs in new forms. Could that be the closest thing to a time-travel experience?
Learning
Sabbatical-not-working-for-tech. It continues to be great and weird. The free space in the mind is just something I had never experienced in vacations or holidays. Even extended ones. The weird part is that the entire world around me doesn't function like that. Most of the time it feels like I’m cheating. What it really feels like is a sort of displacement. A socio-cultural displacement from the surrounding reality.
Music. On guitar, two current goals are improvisation flow and improvising through harmony changes. It gets very technical, needs a lot of patience and slowness and then suddenly you sit down without thinking about it and the hands seem to do the job, surprising your ears. I may never fully grasp how it happens. On drums, displacement of accents continues to be a primary goal. After being an instinctive drummer for my whole life, there is a lot of frustration because it is easy not to do the work and play what I'm comfortable with. Counting with a loud-ish voice as I displace elements is also something I ignored for a long time. In a short-not-so-short period (6-ish months) it has had an audible impact on my playing.
Updated on August 12th, 2026, from my home in Rio de Janeiro. Now page? What, why?!