Rua Girassol 1291, São Paulo, Brazil | +55-11-984-320-333 | luciano@<my-last-name>.org
To present new technology to IT professionals in the most engaging, accurate, and clear ways.
Technical communicator, teacher, community leader, international speaker, and author of Fluent Python (O’Reilly, 2015).
I started at ThoughtWorks as a consultant developer working on client projects for two years at our Porto Alegre and São Paulo offices.
I am now a member of our global Learning and Development distributed team, reporting to a manager located in Hamburg, Germany. Our team designs corporate learning programs, and selects then rolls out and manages platforms to support learning for all 5500+ ThoughtWorks employees in 14 countries around the world.
I am also a ThoughtWorks luminaire, with a personal travel budget to present at our offices, public conferences and meetups, and to organize community events. In 2018 I’ve presented at public events in Brazil, United States, Dominican Republic, and India. See my official ThoughtWorks public profile.
After presenting talks with excellent participant ratings in previous years, I was invited by InfoQ to curate the Languages of the 21st Century track for the 2018 and 2019 São Paulo editions of QCon, a top-tier international conference held in multiple cities around the world.
While working as a free-lance developer and consultant, I founded Python Pro, a training company offering online and in-house courses for enterprises and individuals. In 2015, Renzo Nuccitelli joined the company, and today he delivers courses designed by me or by him. My current work and travel schedule does not allow me to teach regularly at Python Pro, but I am still a partner and I am working on new classes.
The experience listed above is the most recent and the most relevant to my current career goals. My career as a self-employed or company-employed software developer, instructor, and consultant started in 1985. I was CTO of one of the largest pioneering news Web portals in Brazil, led teams building large-scale Intranets for banks and media companies, and developed interactive educational software, client-server systems on Windows, multimedia CD-ROMs for MacOS and Windows, etc. I’ve led consulting teams and taught technical subjects at banks, media conglomerates, and government departments at federal, state and city levels. Please check my LinkedIn profile for more information.
I wrote Fluent Python in English, but it has since been translated to Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Japanese, Polish, Korean, and Portuguese. As of May 2018, Fluent Python has sold more than 40.000 copies in English (print and e-book), and has an aggregate rating of 4.6 stars at Amazon.com, with 86% of readers giving it 5 stars. Please read some of the reader reviews at Amazon.
My graduation thesis was published in the international technical journal Code4Lib. The paper explains why the first normal form is unsuitable to represent bibliographic records, surveys the bibliography of semi-structured database design, and presents a methodology to convert legacy CDS-ISIS bibliographic databases to modern document-oriented databases. It was based on research and concrete work that I did at BIREME, a digital library operated by the WHO (World Health Organization) in the federal medical school in São Paulo (UNIFESP).
I was interviewed in Python Interviews: Discussions with Python Experts (Mike Driscoll — Packt).
I was technical reviewer of:
I wrote the foreword for Pytest Quick Start Guide (Bruno Oliveira — Packt).
I am acknowledged by the authors for pre-release contributions to:
I am a self-taught software developer and teacher. After more than 20 years of professional experience, I wanted to learn the theory behind usability research and information architecture, and that’s why I got the LIS degree — in Brazil, that is the only degree that covers user studies, the foundation for the user-centered design of interfaces and information spaces. My graduation thesis was about semi-structured document databases (see From ISIS to CouchDB, above).
The TDC Rock Star award is given to speakers and track organizers at The Developers Conference — the largest conference for software developers in Brazil — in recognition to outstanding community leadership, conference track curation, and technical communication.
The title of PSF Fellow is awarded to persons who served the Python community through extraordinary efforts in organizing Python events, publicly promoting Python, and teaching and coordinating others.
The Dorneles Tremea award is given in memory of a co-founder and late president of the Brazilian Python Association (APyB), in recognition to outstanding services for the Python Community in Brazil.
I’ve been a very active speaker, tutorial instructor, track organizer, and attendee at conferences and meetups for 27 years, with very high ratings and repeated invitations from organizers, sometimes for multiple talks or tutorials at the same conference. Most of my slide decks are at speakerdeck.com/ramalho.
Some conferences I’ve presented at:
I’ve also presented live Webinars with hundreds of attendees online:
I am a co-founder and event organizer at Garoa Hacker Clube, the first hackerspace in Brazil. Garoa is a self-sustaining collective lab, open to all, operated and managed by its members.
Among many activities I’ve led there, the Arduino Coding Dojo is a hands-on introduction to hardware programming. We used breadboard circuits in the early dojos, and later a professionally manufactured Arduino add-on, the Garoa Dojo Shield, invented by me. The key achievement of this project is not technological but pedagogical: I have successfully tailored activities using the Garoa Dojo Shield to engage very diverse participants, from middle-school kids and journalism students with zero programming experience, to Mozilla software engineers. See a short video of the Garoa Dojo shield in action.
I am a co-founder and was the first president of the Associação Python Brasil (APyB), a volunteer-run, community association created to help organize conferences, meetups, and workshops for the Python community in Brazil. I am currently a member of the APyB. Like the PSF, the APyB supports several initiatives to increase diversity in our community, such as PyLadies, DjangoGirls, and AfroPython.
Programming language levels, loosely inspired by ThoughtWorks skill ratings:
✦ | Some theoretical knowledge, little or no practice. Interested in learning more. |
✦✦ | Practiced developing small projects on my own. More practice needed. |
✦✦✦ | Experience developing projects. Able to teach and present to the public. |
✦✦✦✦ | Recognized authority. Created content reaching thousands of viewers/readers. |