Who am I?
Hi, I like money!
-- Mr. Krabs
My name is Lucas Morais, 26 (as of 2026), and I'm from Brazil (not that very proud of it, given the country situation). I've been a developer for over 10 years, with the last 8 working in the financial industry including blockchain technologies.
I built most of my career around digital banking solutions using Java, since I'm primarily a backend developer.
I've recently become a Staff SWE at a digital bank I'm currently working at, and it's been a great experience so far. Honestly, I've been ready for this for about 2 years now, but I was afraid of failing mainly because all my peers are about 35 to 48 years old. Gladly, I met an awesome manager that gave me the confidence for the step up.
What I do?
I kinda spoiled that already haven't I? So, I'll talk about what I do besides my 9-to-5 job.
Most of the time, I work on open-source projects or side projects. Most of which, are distributed and/or decentralized systems that I build from scratch just for the fun of it.
Recently, I've been working on a DAG-based decentralized ledger for truly private AND anonymous transactions between its users. The idea is having something like Monero with the speed of Sui, Solana, and similar networks.
I've also been working on a unix-like posix-compliant monolithic kernel in Rust, which I'm currently rewriting from scratch because it turned out to be shit and unmaintainable (again, not my first kernel project lmao).
I'm also been planning a custom git hosting platform that I can use to host my own projects, having custom CI/CD pipelines (yes, with a custom action runner and all of that), custom package registries, and some fancy features but without the AI bullshit. You might even see this one available soon (next 1 ~ 3 months from now, I'm not unemployed).
What are my interests?
Sounds cliche, but I'm actually interested in anything that is related to tech and specially programming. I can write "beautiful modern frontends" but as you can see, I like this retro 90s style the best. And I'm not even from the 90s I'm just done with all the modern tech stacks that have 100+ abstractions to do a simple thing.
But I'm not just interested in tech, I'm also interested in chemistry, biology, physics, mechanical engineering, and farming tech (I've my own vegetable garden, that is basically an on-going scientific experiment).
Mechanical engineering and automation tech is my favorite sub-interest by far. I'm a Factorio addict.
I'm also looking into Zig, which comes as a modern C alternative (time to admit it, Rust is NOT the modern C alternative). Rust is a passion of mine, and besides my 9-to-5 job, I work on my own projects in Rust.
In fact, this entire website is built entirely in Rust without zero npm packages, client and server side JS, and even a database or external services.
Why you don't like AI?
It's not that I don't like AI, but rather what people do with it in such a sloppy manner (a.k.a AI slop). I admit its a great tool in the belt, but it has scientifally been proven that when you stop using your own brain it contracts and you become objectively dumber.
I'm all for it in the enterprise where we have tight deadlines, need to output code as fast as possible to meet business demands and is somewhat worried to keep a good codebase quality. Yes, with modern techniques you can reduce to almost eliminate AI slop in your codebase. But this is reserved for a senior team with a deep understanding of AI and its limitations, paired with a strong engineering culture and patterns.
Most companies don't have that. Most single users don't have that either. Then we have slop.
This website itself used AI, not to generate code but rather to explain some libraries I used which I've never touched before, like askama and axum.
When you use AI to empower your own brain, I have no complaints. But you can see that the new generation of developers are significantly dumber than the ones in the generation before, mfs can't even solve a binary cartesian product problem.
Yeah yeah, I'm being very pedantic here. Not everyone is obliged to know what they don't know, specially engineers at the start of their careers.
Infuriating nonetheless.
Where are we going?
No idea. Gave up trying to plan it all out.
But I guess, if I really had to say it, I think everything is converging back to the monolithic, FTP-style deployments and whatnot. It's the great rollback all over again, baby!
Jokes aside ~or not~, today there's more branches to tech than ever and I have a very ample set of interests so I might even retire earlier and go live in Japan with my wife, or stay in Brazil and work on cultivating the land idk.
Whatever choice you do, make sure you are doing it in a way to not leave any doubts and regrets (and also AI slop in your codebase). If you think you are going to regret doing/not doing something today, you are probably going to regret it soon enough.
I'm young, yet just recently have I realized this important aspect of life. Never again I wish to regret my decisions so I'm living today to the fullest.
That's it folks, it was a pleasure to meet you and thank you for reading a bit about me.
System.exit(0);