Hi, I'm Isma
I am a web developer in Coimbra, Portugal. Most of what I know came from building things rather than reading about them — I do the reading first, it just does not stick until the thing has to actually run. I live on my own here, with a cat called Noir who has opinions about my working hours.
I am no good at spending a Saturday indoors — a day that disappears into a television feels like one I have been charged for — so the weekend usually has something in it. The sea, a hike that runs , a geocache I have been meaning to find for longer than I will admit to, or whatever somebody has talked the group into this month.
None of which I would bother doing alone. A story only half exists until somebody else was there for it too, and the half you keep is the one somebody can still bring up years later. That is most of why I would rather build something with somebody than on my own.
When I'm not at a desk
Surfing
The one that stuck, and I think it is staying. No engines and no contraptions in it — everything except the board and the wetsuit was already there. Every wave is its own, and you will never get that exact one again. On a bad day I catch almost nothing and come home happy anyway: an hour of puts the rest of the week back in proportion. Good waves are a bonus, not the point.
Kickboxing
I need to stay in shape and cannot make myself care about lifting weights — there has to be a game in it. I trained properly until work and the army took the hours. It is still where I go when the sea is not an option. It was never really a fight against anybody else, though: your own timing, your own patience, the same three things you got wrong last week. Roughly what a stubborn bug asks for, too.
Travelling
I do not go nearly as often as I would like, so I take it seriously when I do. What I am after is the other point of view: a different way of running an ordinary day, a different idea of what counts as obvious. You come back with people you would not otherwise have met, and with ideas that would never have occurred to you at home.
How I ended up here
After the army I took a private security contract and spent three months on a cargo ship — the Gulf of Mexico, the Panama Canal, the ports around them. Good work, but it put an ocean between me and everyone I knew. I came home wanting to stay close to the people I love, and to build things from one place.
What that would turn into was not obvious at the time, but the ingredients were already lying around. I had been through two courses without finishing either — game development and multimedia, then data engineering — and what stayed with me from both was the loop: you write something, it does something, and it tells you straight away whether you were right. Web development had that underneath and a surface somebody could put their hands on. That was the balance I was after, and it is still the part I enjoy most.
So I took the bootcamp at Ironhack, which was a leap of faith, and it paid off. Three years at Concealed after it, which is where I properly learned the job — React front-ends on Supabase, e-commerce, CMS work; most of the work page came out of those three years. On my accounts I was the person clients came to directly with a request or a bug; anything larger went through a project manager, which is what project managers are for. Great team, the kind you want to be worth something to.
What I want now is the whole wheel. At an agency I had a hand on it; on my own I take the call, scope the thing, build it, and stay with it afterwards — and the person paying talks directly to the person doing the work. That is less about cutting anyone out than about how short the line gets when there is nobody in the middle to keep in the loop. I liked the half of that I already had, and going looking for the rest is most of why I made the move, which on my CV is one more date with none of this behind it.
