A little bit of history…

In mid-2011, still in the commercial career, working in the sales area in a company called Dinâmica Sistemas (acquired by AlterData a few years later), I can say that I acquired great knowledge, both in the personnel department market and how not to do things, but this is another story for another post. 😝

It was a decisive moment in my life; my daughter had just been born, the sales market always had ups and downs, months with high sales commissions and others not so much, and in the past, I had already thought about changing areas, but Could not. I started graduation in Business Administration and did not adapt; I moved to Accounting because I always liked money (Who never? 😁); however, accounting for third-party money was not my goal.

At this time, I met my friend and mentor, Leonardo Jaques, Léo. I always thank him for what I am today and for the valuable advice he gave me at the time, which still accompanies me. Thank you! Count on me always! He discovered a talent, which until then, I didn't know, programming. It was common at the time, but I do not know if it is still so; companies did not have robust software for commercial areas/sales, as was the case of this company; right away, I discovered one of the qualities that every programmer should have: Laziness. When I came across that archive of drop-down folders, I immediately asked myself:

“Unable to search for sales history and customer relationship in this paperwork!”

That's when it all started.

I met with "The guy of marketing and project management", Leonardo Jaques, to draw up a plan to improve the sales and marketing strategy of the company, and soon we agreed that we should start with the automation and/or scanning of the process, that's when I mentioned that I worked very well with Excel and that I had even done some dynamic spreadsheets with macros and VBA, yes, VBA, I think the discovery of Leo came from there; I do not know; he will comment here in the post and will confirm me for those who don't know.

"Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's Visual Basic embedded in all Microsoft Office programs - within this package are the famous Office applications, such as Visio, and which has also been incorporated at least partially into other third-party programs such as AutoCAD, Mathcad, and WordPerfect. (Wikipedia)"

So, we started our journey as a pathfinder. It was a "Closed Forest" with many ways to open with "blind machetes." I remember we decided to change the sales strategy because we had been hired to increase the company's profit. We started by understanding customers, organizing the house, and developing a way to capitalize more on the business portfolio.{.pt-4}

If I remember correctly, at that time, Leo was studying for his MBA in project management. So that you, readers, understand how everything coincidentally fitted, he put what he was learning into practice. He called me to venture to create a sales system to improve our process, and I do not know if I commented; we worked in a software house. We were about to create a system in parallel, which, in the end, we created, using limited resources because it was not our area, so we could not request the resources for the same, and my simple and newly discovered talent for programming. And as I couldn't help but make the much-deserved tribute, the constructed system would be called Louyse Commercial Automation, created basically with VBA as the programming language, Microsoft Access as a database, and, of course, I can not help but mention here, a site full of material that helped me a lot at the time Usando Access, great Avelino Sampaio, we used the package Monta Ribbons to style our system, great learnings. 😄

It was there that I made my first contact with Scrum. Yes, as I said, Leo had already inserted the excellent design practices he had learned; look at the photo of our first kanban frame, entitled Burn Down and all 😉 Thanks again, my friend, for eternalizing this moment, photo taken with the great warrior, Nokia C3.

From there, a lot changed. We really improved the sales process; we caused some intrigue when the development manager discovered us; although he did not understand that that frame was full of post-its and graphics, the system worked, and he began to ask yourself if it was necessary. We used the network to store the "source code" and share the "database," forgive us because we were beginners in programming; the director was satisfied with the efficiency in generating sales reports, even without knowing until today, how they were generated so fast and with such good appearance. We managed to unify the commercial assistant of telemarketing and marketing, improving the performance of my retail visits and ending the peace of the real guys of 😂 development. I did not comment that they worked with Delphi 4, and if it does not fail my memory, with the database "Paradox", which unintentionally, we found that we could import all this in Access, maximum security, huh 😝.

We worried about the development manager when we found a desire to migrate the database to MS SQL 2005. "Beautiful thing!" It was the hook I needed to sell, and I sold it and announced to the four corners that we were releasing a modern and secure version of the system and was already in pre-sale and/or upgrade. Customers loved it, and the development sector freaked out!!!

A note: Today, I understand the suffering of the development crowd, but at that time, it was still 100% commercial, so "friends, friends, business a part"…

I joined the University of Analyses and Development of Systems in August 2012. At UniCarioca University, I got an internship through the hitherto IT boy, who today is also a great friend of mine, Luan Santos, aka Santana; thank you for everything, Santana, and the rest; I'll gradually tell you what changed from there to here, in future posts.

That is a little of my stories, and I hope to share them even more with you; with time, my claim and to be able to make publications at least once a week with varied topics between career, software development, daily life, and some relevant facts of the day to day of a programmer. This is my first of many posts. I tried to be as brief as possible in introducing my transition from commercial manager to developer. I hope you enjoyed it; feel free to comment, share, and answer any questions. I will always be available to answer, and my social networks and email are always available.

A strong hug and success!!!