In a nutshell, I’m a geek in a suit – complete with a Systems Engineering degree, a decade and a half of overexposure to the Internet, and (horror of horrors to the uninitiated), Marketing experience.
I’ve pretty much done it all where it comes to the telco world, having been immersed in Wi-Fi, 3G (UMTS) and IP-related stuff at a major GSM operator for several years, either acting as a solutions architect and interfacing with Marketing or as a product manager and interfacing with Engineering, dealing with long, big, extremely convoluted projects that span national borders and have to be split across yearly budgets, the sort of thing that takes years to show a profit – but when it does, it’s a big one.
No, I won’t bother you with my CV. I honestly can’t be bothered with it myself, but I guess some sort of background information is in order here…
Where? What? How? When?
So, by popular demand, here’s a little chart of what I did, where I did it and proof those places outlived my presence there, without giving away too much (the chart needs updating to 2008, but the gist of it is still valid):
If I had a job description, it would be somewhere between “geek herder” and “organizational interpreter”. What I do most, of course (besides drowning in e-mail, Excel spreadsheets, product specs, internal memos and IETF or 3GPP specs), is mediate – that is, present and explain things to people in an understandable fashion, complete with diagrams that actually mean something, and then get them to act upon it.
I do a lot of analysis, planning and budgeting stuff, usually on the bleeding edge of things – which, in a mobile operator, means three-year-long projects that will use some sort of technology that isn’t even around yet , so there is a lot of paperwork involved while vendors hammer out the details with us. It adds up to a lot of documents, prototypes, tests, and umpteen versions of network diagrams (the kind that won’t even fit into a 20” screen – believe me, I tried it).
I also have a knack for getting involved in all the latest bleeding edge tech, mostly because I’ve been doing new product development for so long that if something isn’t working or needs clarification, it usually finds its way to my desk on its own (I honestly don’t go looking for any of it, and it can get unnerving at times). And it’s long stopped being merely technical – if any issue has impact on the business model of a service, it probably crosses my desk as well.
My work is, in a nutshell, a lot of convoluted discussions concerning the intersection between technology and business models in the mobile frontier. That should give you an idea of how wild it can get, and how leery I am of hype and fantastic new business models (especially the kind with revenue projections that only go up).
It’s damned hard, damned stressful, and currently requires a degree of self-motivation that most people can’t even begin to guess at, since I often find myself at odds with several conflicting business/technical/policy issues at a time, and no way out but disentangling them bit by bit. Literally.
Obviously, the people who work around me are a great help (and I count myself lucky in that regard).
Why The Mac?
There’s a whole FAQ on the site, but the gist of it is that I needed something more (at least something more immediately rewarding), and since I can’t ever really tune out from work, I did the next best thing: a few years back I bought an iMac and went back to basics: powerful, flexible computers that don’t crash and actually let me do what I want to do with my dwindling free time, like managing my humungous CD collection, tallying my books and sorting my photo album.
The Mac also lets me indulge in the odd game (which tends to be every six months or so), code a few experiments, keep track of the multitude of projects I’m always involved in, and, of course, maintain this site.
It started out as a sort of experiment, and now I find it to be the most productive environment I ever used. I’d gladly swap all my office PCs for a single MacBook Pro – and, with luck, someday I will.
But let’s not go there.
Contact Information
I can be reached as rui dot carmo at this domain (heavily Spam filtered, use with caution), as well as a couple of other addresses – but this is the best way to reach me.
I am infamous for apparently ignoring your messages and replying up to three months or so later – please be reassured that it is nothing personal, I just have these “off” phases where I don’t pay any attention to my personal e-mail – or even computers.
Finally, please take a moment to read this site’s Disclaimer if you haven’t done so yet.
One thing you should be aware of is that I don’t subscribe to the notion that everything I do, know or purport to know should be public (or at least plastered on the web). I’m not part of the MySpace generation. I’m a very private person (all things considered), and anyone who looks for reassurance regarding what I am, know or do using Google or scouring through this site is being amazingly naïve, to say the least.