From Cinema to Java

In JAVA everything’s great. I have never been there, but some people say that surfing in the island of Java, in Indonesia, is wild. To me coffee is what makes me travel to that paradise without leaving my home. Travelling like that has always been one of my biggest passions. But what I really loved was to guide people on those awesome trips.

I am addicted to telling stories and I have found on cinema and television the perfect way to express myself. I studied Cinema Production and Television, against all my peer’s opinion. While studying I worked in every production that I could find, and I participated in every screenwriting competition. At the end of my degree I was invited by the London Film Academy to learn during one-year advanced techniques of film production.

I worked in London 9 years. I won several cinema festivals, including an award in Short Film Corner of Cannes Festival. I produced several documentaries, commercials and videoclips, that were launched worldwide. But there was a special event that would change my life forever.

Between 2011 and 2013 I worked at Apple Inc. in London. During that period, I had the honor to spend some time in Cupertino, in California, producing a video with the R&D Department of Apple. I was absolutely amazed with the things that those guys did just by coding. They created things from scratch, they thought and worked in a different way. That impressed me. So as soon as I came back from London, I did two tutorials, one of JavaScript and another one of Java. It was very hard, but I loved the challenge.

I kept on working on Cinema and TV until 2015. After my vacations on Lisbon, I decided that I should go back to Portugal. However, the employability problems in cinema in my country forced me to leave a 14 years career in Cinema and TV to start something new: I was going to start programming.
In 2017 I got in Academia de Código. For 4 months I had no personal life. I only had time to code Java 24/7. I learned a lot and I loved the experience. I found in Java and in OOP a way of creating and making my ideas reality. Just the computer and me. Coding is very similar to telling a story. Expressing myself through code might seem strange, but that’s how I see it. Choosing Java was easy. It’s one of the most demanded technologies in the market and it incorporates very well the OOP (Object Oriented Programming). It allows me to tell my stories in a structured way. If I need to change the end, the middle or the beginning of a story I can do it without ruining the rest of it (it’s a pretty simple way to explain it, I know.)

I have changed radically my life and I don’t regret it one bit. I lived experiences in Cinema that I will never forget. But I feel that I have done everything that I had to do on that industry. Programming allows me to explore new challenging seas, so that maybe in the future I can arrive to that island called Java.

By: Nelson
Smartie Java