About
TL;DR This particular David Ramalho broadly falls into the Geek camp. Ex-Expat currently enjoying the lovely Irish weather not-enjoying the oppressive Portuguese heat (possibly other things as well) with his wife and two kids. Helping the art and entertainment community but also helping expand the accommodation business with the power of Ruby, this human insists he’s never happy but sadly Life disagrees and gives him a happy life anyway.
Today
Back Then
Day OneLife
May 1979
I was born
Can't really remember, I hear it was a blast.
February 2004
Got married and moved from parents home
This one I can remember and it was a blast. Very very happy day, married the woman who had brought so much happiness, the ceremony was simple and practical - like us :) - and that was the day I also moved to my new house. Life started anew on that day.
January 2006
Child #1 was born
I DEFINITELY REMEMBER THIS ONE, it was a blast. And it was the day that raised the bar on life-changes to over 9000. It's been a voyage through the unknown and a wild ride at that, but that's forever one of best days of my life.
November 2010
Child #2 was born
I DEFINITELY REMEMBER THIS ONE (#2), it was (also) a blast. I remember that I got home very very late that night, after another amazing Codebits event, I went to bed and next I remember my wife was very gently waking me and telling me to get dressed because her waters broke - that's the last "gentle" moment I remember that day, after that it's the craziness of birth and the follow-up. Another of the best days of my life.
October 2012
Idiot abroad
Another first, we left our home country with bags and a couple of young children and set off to the biggest adventure this family had so far. No regrets, no obstacle we couldn't overcome.
August 2021
Ex-Idiot abroad
Reunited with the family who had moved ahead of time, I have returned to the land of the 50°C Summer!
Other life
June 2001 – Present
Co-founded the company with a couple of friends from ISEL - it has certainly taught me a lot throughout these long years, never got me closer to being rich though.
June 2001 – March 2006 (~6 years)
DGV (the Portuguese Department of Motor Vehicle)
For almost six years I did general IT management and development - this was before DevOps was cool of course :) . I met a lot of interesting people there, but I also had hands-on experience with working "for" the government, which greatly reduces the probabilities of that ever happening again.
2008 (sometime) – December 2010
This was my first company that targeted a particular product - unlike Blackorange, which is more service oriented - Shirikisha came out of a project that me and a friend developed a while earlier and it was interesting to pursue that. We had to generalize the interface and allow for customization and bespoke development, run around trying to get customers, identify what we actually had, all that. My co-founders were older, more experienced people and they taught me a lot. In the end of course, we didn't get the traction we wanted and a couple of similar products were running faster and stronger than we did, we decided to pull the plug on it. It was also my first excursion into Ruby and Ruby on Rails (2.0), which is funny now that I think about it :) . Interesting times they were.
July 2009 – September 2012
What can I say, SAPO was at the time arguably the biggest geek company in Portugal. I got exposure to different problems at a different scale, bigger teams, more separation of responsibilities, integration with a whole range of services that make sure different projects integrate and rely on each other, interesting people, interesting projects - sure, not all of them, but I had a chance to work on some very interesting ones, ones that touched very close to my ideals. Loved it there, made a few life long friends.
October 2012 – Present
This project had everything, moving to a different country to join a startup and build a product from scratch with a super team. Heck, it could hardly be a better match for me, it matched my entrepreneurship past, my inclination for big / long-term projects and I could take the family and try life in a different country. It also meant I was back to Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and that in itself was special on its own. I don't know how this story ends of course, but we work like hell and we can see the metrics going up, which means we're doing something good.
August 2021 – Present
A true challenge, lots of ambition, lots of constraints but I'm back with my business partner and it's a project that I know well - I'll update this later in life :)
Work
I’ve worked across a handful of companies over the years — from a small Portuguese government IT department, through a couple of startups I co-founded, to SAPO and Homestay.com — mostly building things with Ruby and Ruby on Rails since the 2.0 days.
This site
I’ve been writing here, in one form or another, since 2004 — through several different technology stacks (WordPress, Jekyll, and now this one). It’s mostly a place to think out loud about code, photography, and whatever else is rattling around.