Current Location: Barcelona, Spain → GMT+1
Languages: Portuguese, English and French. + some German and a bit of Greek. Currently learning Spanish and Catalan.
Pronouns: She/her, they/them
Slack: @etiene
Nationality: Brazilian
Loves: Making barbecues
Hates: Melons
<aside> ⚠️ Heya there 👋 I'm Etiene. I'm a senior software engineer passionate about languages with an MSc in computer science researching computational linguistics. I started Polygloss as my MSc. project and now I'm very excited to see how it is going to evolve.
</aside>
Software Engineering, Computational Linguistics, Language Learning, Start-ups, Strategy, Rolling up my sleeves, Saying Yes, Saying No.
I grew up in Niterói, a city across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I went to a local community school until middle school, then a technical public high school in Rio city, where I learned about how to be a pharmacy lab technician. My first official work place was an internship at the Brazilian Jockey Club, where I was preparing the anti-doping test samples of race-horses for spectrophotometry. I went to that school because I wanted to study medicine later and help people, but I quickly found out I wouldn't be able to handle such a career. Already only in high school I burned out, got severe depression, had a few seizures, was misdiagnosed with epilepsy and took strong medications for years. I was also commuting three hours a day to go school which had a 7am-5h40pm schedule. I gave up on writing the internship report for the technical course and went to Music university instead, at UFRJ, where I studied classical piano. Turns out that was very stressful too (which any musician could have told me). Trying to focus on studies several hours a day for months to prepare a repertoire for a bunch of old men waiting for you to fail and having no big career prospects after all of that is also quite a bummer. The routine to be successful is bonkers and there is no space for being mediocre. I dropped out on 2011 at the end of the third year. I barely touch a piano nowadays, but I’m still very proud of having passed the music exams to enter.
Around that time I was still maintaining a pirate server of Ragnarok Online, a MMORPG I was addicted to as a teenager, and that I now made some money from. I started learning programming and how to keep things online with it. It was called LuminaRO and at some point it got to the top 1 server at a major international ranking. At its peak, it had about 1400 simultaneous players online, running on two dedicated servers at Softlayer, lots of different hats to wear, and team of volunteer game masters. By the time the server started to decline, I was about to start a new major on Information Systems at PUC-Rio, with a scholarship for tuition-fees. So I shut it down to focus on studies and do internships where I can get better at the technical bits. Midway through the degree, I was approved for a governmental exchange program, then ended up staying at ENSTA-Bretagne, in Brest, France. There I got an MEng degree on Systems, Perception, Information and Decision, and a specialization in Software Engineering for Embedded Systems.
After graduating, I moved to London to work as a Software Engineer in a web consultancy. And at QMUL, I got a Computer Science MSc, under Computational Linguist Massimo Poesio’s supervision. That’s when I started creating Polygloss.
Throughout this journey I did many different jobs within Software Engineering: game development, data engineering, web development, developer advocacy, cloud infrastructure, mobile development pment, natural language processing... Every job has been different than the one before! I also moved a lot. Besides Brazil and France, I lived in Berlin, London, and am now I’m in Barcelona. That's 13 flats in 12 years.
As you can see, I am very chaotic, this is how my brain and how my life works. But I consider myself to be chaotic good. Even though I am not always coping with my ADHD and my social anxiety, I am always trying my best. I'm everyday learning new things to improve on myself and the world. I'm very concerned about quality of mental health, the current advanced state of capitalism and human suffering, and how to exist and resist in this world full of stressful events. I'm a feminist and a radical leftist, slowly moving towards anarcho-syndicalism.
My role models are Paulo Freire, bell hooks, David Graeber and Bette Graham.
Favorite song (specifically this interpretation)
Favorite song (specifically this interpretation)
A lot of things align, since I started the project :) But I want to add that my whole life was transformed by learning English. It enabled me to learn so much more about anything I want. I'm really happy to do the change I want to see in the world. Besides, learning languages is healthy for cognition, something that I am personnally concerned about.
I'm really interested in politics, education and, more recently, complex dynamic systems. I'm keen to learn more about agent-based models and unite all of these interests to create a transformative human-centric language learning experience. I'm also very interested in learning more about managing people towards a common goal and fostering knowledge-sharing and trust.