about

right now, i work at Clerk on identity, authentication, and user management products. since joining, i've worked across different parts of the product, including the dashboard rewrite and helping grow the product even further. the longer version is under work, along with talks and questionable experiments that seemed reasonable at the time

and then there's now, a dated snapshot of whatever currently has my attention. this page is about the common denominator: me, somehow. the longer answer starts with one habit: i like solving problems, whatever shape, form, or file extension they come in, and keep asking why long after the how makes sense

  1. so... what do you do?
  2. i'm a software engineer
  3. that's it?
  4. no, but the other answer takes like 40 minutes

the map is not the territory

the decisions and defaults i cannot leave alone, plus the inconvenient fact that my own answers probably deserve just as much suspicion

i'm skeptical by default and mildly iconoclastic on purpose. when a decision, default, or pattern feels inevitable, i want to know who chose it, what it solved, and whether the problem still exists. the fact that something works is not proof it should work that way

that instinct has to point inward too. the gap between models and reality reminds me that every explanation leaves something out, including mine. day to day, that means asking one more question before deciding and letting new information ruin a perfectly good opinion. a little rude, sure, but pretty useful too

plans are not mileage

totalling 38 flights between 2024 and 2026, adding up to 179 hours and 43 minutes in the air, with each route making the map a little less abstract

when i arrived in Japan after a 16-hour flight from New York, i was jet-lagged, alone, and didn't know a word of Japanese. i took the wrong train out of the airport and ended up on a random street at 3am on a strangely peaceful Monday in Tokyo. i was scared and, for a while, thought i had pushed this one too far, but that night was mostly a rough beginning. the important part was the trip that followed, and slowly realizing that i could be scared or unsure and still figure out what came next

mileage is not the point

what happened when places i knew as names on a map became somewhere i could get lost, eat, meet people, and eventually miss

as a kid, i was obsessed with maps, globes, and whatever was on the other side of them. i thought travel would be mostly about finally seeing all those beautiful places for myself: standing in front of landmarks i already knew from photographs, eating the thing every guide said i had to try, and getting my own version of the picture everyone takes. all of that mattered, but what stayed was ordinary life: how people eat, cross a city, talk to strangers, and make a place feel... normal

in Japan, i stayed long enough for daily life there to become ordinary. during those two months, i met a couple on a trail near Nikkō and had dinner with them. the next day, i joined them at a festival somewhere in the mountains that only lasts until the snow sculptures melt. at some point that night i was standing inside an igloo with people who had been complete strangers a day earlier. that is the part of travel i keep

back in Florianópolis, chopsticks still take me to Japan; the smell of char siu brings back Hong Kong's noise and impossible density. home is quieter, but leaving it keeps changing what i notice when i return. i think that back and forth is why i keep wanting to go again

photographic evidence

talks, trails, cities, and the occasional moment when somebody else remembered to point the camera my way while i was too busy looking elsewhere to notice
  • Rafael on a trail, looking toward the horizon with trees behind himphoto 1 of 9
  • Rafael standing close to the Golden Gate Bridge at nightphoto 2 of 9
  • Rafael photographing his reflection in a mirrored wall in San Francisco, in black and whitephoto 3 of 9
  • Rafael with a group outside a restaurant after dinner following his last talk at Front in Floripaphoto 4 of 9
  • Rafael standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Franciscophoto 5 of 9
  • Rafael looking across the water at Hong Kong's skylinephoto 6 of 9
  • Rafael sitting at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Franciscophoto 7 of 9
  • Rafael standing in front of Osaka Castlephoto 8 of 9
  • Rafael looking across a mountain range in Hong Kongphoto 9 of 9

i like photography not only as an art form, but as a way to show, advocate for, or protest something. Trabalhadores is the clearest example on my shelf: the scale is hard to take in, but the people never disappear inside it. even when i'm mostly documenting where i've been, carrying a camera changes what i notice

other ways of seeing

some ideas make more sense to me as a room, an object, an image, or a sound than they ever would in words, which is a useful excuse to keep looking at all of them

architecture, design, and fashion have apparently made me easy to sell enormous books to. i found a Dieter Rams book in Germany and traded a ridiculous amount of luggage space for it. an extremely heavy monument to keeping things simple. worth it

Figures of Speech goes in every direction instead. i open it for one reference and lose an hour among drafts, clothes, furniture, photographs, and buildings. seeing so much of Virgil Abloh's process makes the finished work feel less like magic and more like a mind refusing to stay in one lane. exactly my kind of object

what's been on repeat

the 6 tracks i've returned to most over the last few months. no defense will be provided, but Spotify has made sure the evidence is available anyway

music is less polite about waiting its turn. one AirPod means it is following whatever else i'm doing; two means i'm shutting the rest of the world out. the rotation changes quickly. books, records, and movies take longer to earn a place on the shelf, usually because some feeling, question, place, or earlier version of me is still attached

a speaker, sometimes

for as long as i can remember, i've needed to share what i'm learning, partly to find out whether i learned it at all, and partly to make it useful to somebody else too

i'm not going to pretend this is entirely selfless. a talk or post gives me an excuse to pick something apart, go deeper than i probably needed to, and keep going until i can explain it to a complete stranger, or at least make them appreciate why it matters

some attempts became talks and live with the rest of my work. others needed more room and ended up on the blog, where i had enough space to find out what i actually thought. either way, another person has to be able to follow the idea without borrowing all the context in my head. if they get lost, that usually means i skipped a step too

that's the longer answer, or at least the version i can defend today. the parts changing too quickly to belong here live over in now