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Why I decided to write more in Portuguese

About 10 years ago, I set a goal for myself: I wanted to work for a Big Tech™ company. That meant I had to learn English. My strategy was to switch everything I could in my day-to-day life to English: my phone and computer, watching TV in English, all my note taking, and whatever else I could think of.

Looking back, I’d say it worked well for me. I left Brazil in 2015 to work for Facebook in London, and in 2016 I gave my first talk in English (at React.JS Conf) in front of hundreds of people, back at a time when conferences still happened in person. Since then I also lived in the Netherlands, US and now Sweden. I also worked for Uber, Apple and now Klarna.

I have never been a very public person, but throughout this time I gave about a dozen talks and wrote about the same number of blog posts, so slowly I accumulated a small-ish audience. On top of the content I produced related to my day job, I also kept all my personal blogging, social medias and everything else in English. After all, it was good for practicing, and a good chunk of my followers didn’t speak Portuguese, and it increased the number of people I could potentially reach.

However, a few things happened over the last couple of years that really changed my perspective:

  1. For one, the pandemic hit me pretty hard and, just like many folks I know, got me feeling really disconnected from my family, friends, peers and all the communities I used to be a part of.
  2. A Brazilian company reached out to me, and even though things didn’t work out, I was more excited about the idea of reconnecting with the Brazilian tech community than I had been about anything else in quite a while.
  3. This in turn led me to reflect about how disconnected I had been from the Brazilian tech community, since long before the pandemic. The last event I participated in Brazil was a conference back in 2016.

I reflected on that for a few months, and I knew that I really wanted contribute back to the tech community that was crucial to my career, but I wasn’t quite sure how I could contribute or what I had to offer. On top of that, if I switched back to writing in Portuguese I’d have a smaller potential audience and I didn’t really want to annoy the few followers I had slowly accumulated over the years, some of which were people who I really admired and who didn’t speak Portuguese.

In the end, I realized I didn’t really care… Yes, there’s a larger audience in English, but there’s also a lot more content. So maybe, just maybe, the best way to make a difference isn’t reaching the most people? All that was left was to figure out how to contribute.

Some time later, while having a chat with a fellow Brazillian expat, Diego Ballona, we realized we felt much the same way, and we decided to partner and launch a new project: Comunida.dev. It is an online community where we’re offering mentorship to fellow Brazilians in tech, and we’ll also be sharing relevant content in the form of live interviews on YouTube. Longer term, the goal is to build a real community around it, truly open for anyone to contribute, and we’ll just try and help however we can to get it there.

So… if you’ve been following me because you liked some of my English content, I’m sorry about the recent inrush of Portuguese content, but I’m afraid there will be more. However, if you decide to stick around, there’ll still be English content. I hope to get back to it as soon as I’ve fully adjusted to the new job.

Thank you 🙂