Marzee Labs is made of incredible people. So, we decided to present the people behind it. From co-founders, employees to freelancers, each one of us has its own contribution to the company’s success and accomplishments. We hope you enjoy getting to know us as much as we had fun preparing this series of clippings.
We start with João Belchior, designer, front-end developer and one of Marzee Labs founders. João is a graphic designer at the base and started to work on the web back in the ‘90s.
He worked as a graphic designer until he decided to focus on coding. After preparing and freelancing for over a year while still working as a designer, he made the jump and became a front-end freelancer developer.
For him, the web is a nice place to evolve, constantly learn and progress! He believes that coding for a living is more fulfilling, better paid and more challenging. He was tired of discussing colour tones with printers.
We asked João a couple of questions (like an interview) so you can get to know him better.
What is like to work on the web/code for a living?
It’s interesting, frustrating and challenging all in one. You get to see your work reaching out to people, impacting their life. At the same time, you know your work won’t live long — it will get replaced very quickly. It is also a very challenging field because it moves so fast and you have to be constantly updated.
What is your favourite thing about being a co-founder of a small tech shop?
The fact that you can say no to some projects and be able to set the course of the company. I also like the fact that you can select who works with you and obviously the freedom that it gives you in terms of not having a schedule.
How do you see yourself and your role in the big and vast web world?
I feel that my role (front-end developer) is not recognized enough. Sometimes the frontend work is seen as secondary, people still think that writing CSS is not coding/ programming. We are underestimated somehow, but also essential. You can create as many frameworks as you want but they will never replace a good frontend developer when it comes to edge cases.
What was the most challenging project you have worked on? Why was it challenging? Would you go over it again?
Probably the BEN platform. I had to learn a bunch of new stuff to work on that project efficiently. It was my first work with React, which meant moving away from Drupal and PHP to a completely different framework. Learning this new tech to be able to work comfortably in that project was a challenging and rewarding process. To give an idea of how challenging it was — It took several years on that project to replace angular with react and bootstrap with custom scss code — getting rid of Angular in the process.
What inspires and motivates you?
What inspires me is basically seeing that there are still so many things to learn and explore out there. When I see sites and read articles showing that more technologies are coming in and that it will be fun to use it. What motivates me is having a team that likes to learn and that I am still relevant for them in what I have to teach. I also like learning from them and see what they are doing.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Runaway !! Just Kidding. Basically, say to take the jump earlier, go into freelancing earlier.
How do you pull away the veil of the dreaded bug to expose it as the beautiful feature that it actually is?
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Magic! In truth, we maintain a transparent relationship with the client. This happens when you work the relation with the client and makes it easier to explain when the client trusts us.
If you could have a super-power, what would you most prefer? Would you use it for good or evil? What super-name would you be known for?
Stopping time at will — everyone freezes but me, and no one notices when things are back to normal. I would use it for both good and evil. My super-name would be “That sounds about right guy!”
What do you like to do in your free time?
Be with the kids, build Lego and restore JoliToy!
João in the interwebs:
Drupal: https://www.drupal.org/u/Jolidog GitHub: https://github.com/jolidog
UPCOMING EVENTS
- [Porto] Wednesday, July 31, 2019 — The Slack Platform Community kicks off in Porto! This is a great event to meet other Slack enthusiasts, developers and entrepreneurs in the local and global Slack community while enjoying some free food and drinks.
- [Porto] Thursday, August 8, 2019 — DevOps Porto #30: Lightning Talks with Python Porto It’s Summertime and it’s time for our, already traditional, lightning talks. As last year, we time up with Python Porto community (https://www.meetup.com/pyporto/) to bring you a great set of talks. The meetup will be held at Euronext.
- [Porto] Thursday, August 8, 2019 — Porto Codes The regular Porto Codes event for all developers of Porto community.
- [Porto] Sunday, August 11, 2019 — PyCoffee in Porto i/o PyCoffee is an experimental format of informal Python meetups, organized by Python Porto in partnership with Porto i/o.