Hi There, nice to meet you! 😊

TLDR

My name is Lucas Meine, I work as a software engineer, born in Brazil, currently living in Sweden.

I like playing the guitar, reading good books, working out, watching youtube videos and spending time with my friends.

I have been experimenting and trying to expand my presence online, and this updated website is part of that effort. If you want to connect with me, this is an excellent place to start!!

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If you want the long story, don't forget the popcorn! 🍿

Below I am writing some kind of an auto biography. Not really in hopes that a lot of people read it, but rather as some sort of a "diary", to remind myself of my own story, if that makes sense?

Early adulthood and college years

After spending my teenage years as a diehard game dev nerd, I joined a game design and development programme in university.

There is below some rare footage of myself during my early university years and creating games on hackatons

Around that time, I started realizing something important. I didn’t necessarily love making games as much as I thought I did, I just really loved programming.

I still enjoyed game dev, but what really got me hooked was the coding part. Solving problems, making things work, building systems, that was the fun part for me.

At some point during university, I got an internship opportunity. It had nothing to do with games, it was web development. Websites, systems, that kind of stuff.

But honestly, I didn’t mind. I wanted to start working, and programming was programming. So I went for it.

Even though I had zero professional experience, I had been coding for years at that point, so the interview was actually pretty chill. I got in, started working, and things escalated really fast from there.

Within a few months, I was already taking on way more responsibility than expected. I got promoted pretty quickly, and before I knew it, I was deeply involved in how things were being built and improved inside the company.

At one point, I built an internal tool to fix some of the pain points we had in our workflow. It ended up working way better than I expected. The whole team started using it, and eventually the company decided to invest in it and turn it into a product.

That was the first time I saw something I built go beyond just “helping out” and actually become something bigger.

Startups, dropping out, and moving to Sweden

That tool eventually became a real product, an online IDE. Back then, that wasn’t as common as it is today, so it was actually a pretty cool thing to be working on.

Around that time, I was invited to become a partner in the company. And yeah, that’s also when I made my first big “life decision”, I dropped out of university.

My mindset back then was basically: “why am I in university if I’m already doing the thing?”. So I went all in on work.

After a while, I decided to give university another shot, but this time in Computer Science instead of game development. I wanted something more focused on programming itself.

Early on, I met a professor during an algorithms class. I talked to him, told him I already had some experience, and asked if there was anything more interesting I could work on instead of the basic stuff.

That conversation changed everything. He invited me to join a research project in Internet of Things at the University of Brasília.

We worked on that project for a while, presented it at conferences, and at some point realized: this thing could actually make money outside of academia.

So we did something a bit crazy. Me, the professor, and a few other researchers started a company together.

That period was intense. We worked like crazy. Long nights, weekends, sometimes 20-hour work sessions. It was chaotic, but it was also fun in a weird way.

At some point, it became impossible to balance both the company and university, so I dropped out again. There was just no way to do both properly.

We kept building, got incubated, partnered with bigger companies, and ended up working with real clients, including industries in the Manaus Free Trade Zone.

After a few years, we eventually sold the company.

And then came one of the most random turning points in my life.

One of my co-founders, who had become one of my best friends, moved to Sweden for a job. One day he called me and basically said: “hey, do you want to come to Sweden? I can refer you.”

I didn’t overthink it. I said yes.

I went through the interviews, got the job, and just like that, I moved to Sweden.

Not long after, more of my friends followed, and somehow we ended up rebuilding our whole circle here.

It’s been years now, and a lot has happened since then. Stuff I couldn’t have predicted at all back when I was just a kid googling how to make games.

Looking back, it was all kind of chaotic. But it worked out.