loop0

2025 Retrospective

Dear reader, I decided to spend some time this end of the year to reflect on my achievements and life in general.

Life events

In March this year I was able to start a new job in a big company. The challenge was that I was going to work with Ruby on Rails, and I had never even done a hello, world in Ruby. It turns out, if you have the skills in programming and the experience that I have, then things are not that hard. Coming from Python I was able to see the differences but also a lot of similarities.

Joining a big company after having worked in startups my whole life was also something new, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of culture, and processes, and people. But now after 9 months in, I can say that I am SO HAPPY to have joined this company and my team. I am working with a LOT of talented people and I no longer feel I’m the smartest person in the (virtual) room (no bragging, just to illustrate what my past years working in different startups were like). Every day I get to learn something new from my colleagues while also being able to bring a lot of my experience to the table.

In July I travelled to Brazil to visit my parents, family and friends. The major thing I miss when living in the US is being close to family and friends, the distance tears me apart, but I know that for now, my life is here and it doesn’t make sense to go back to Brazil. Maybe in a few years?

In August I went to HOPE 16 and it was a blast! So many good talks and very inspiring to walk among hackers and enthusiasts. I am looking forward to next year’s.

I also travelled to Chicago twice this year, as well as Kansas City. It was pretty cool to get to know the midwest, besides the extreme cold, everyone I met was warm and friendly.

Personal achievements

I launched an educational video platform! I had to learn a lot about video encoding and streaming like HLS and DASH, this project was pretty fun and is still going. The stack is composed of Django, Celery, PostgreSQL, FFmpeg and videojs. It is all running on a baremetal server I rent at OVH, deployed using docker and traefik for ingress. This is not open to the public yet, but there are already over 50 active users consuming the content.

I launched a pet project for transcription and indexing of 2600’s Voice BBS, that one was a lot of fun in a short space of time. It all started during the past weekend and took a couple more nights working during this week. Right now if you want to check it out you can head to 2600.loop0.sh, but to access you have to solve the challenge to find the master password. The stack on this one is Django, Meilisearch and PostgreSQL. The transcription was done locally using the whisper large-v3 model, and I ran it under docker using my AMD Radeon 6700xt for processing. I think it took a little over 30 minutes to process all 2.5k files.

I was also able to start a project that involves hardware, I am building my own mp3 player with a raspberry pico and a couple of modules for microsd card and i2s audio amplifier. This project is still in its infancy, it is all connected in a protoboard. I have some code in rust using embedded framework that is able to read the files from the microsd card. Next step is to make it send that audio to the amp and see if I can get some noise out of it. Once I have updates I will post on this blog.

I read a few books this year, but the highlight was the Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled the Cyberspace. It was super cool reading about the 90s hacker scene here in New York City, especially in Astoria, the place I currently live! Definitely recommended. Besides that I read NOFX Hepatitis Bathtub, Infinita Highway (Engenheiros do Hawaii Bio), and a couple other books not worth mentioning.

On the homelab side, I migrated my NAS to new hardware, moved things around between Proxmox and FreeBSD, where now I have it all stable, I have a couple VMs running in bhyve, the FreeBSD host controls the storage with ZFS pools and exports it as NFS and SMB. And in the process I even had a tiny PR merged on the vm-bhyve project. I guess I can call myself a FreeBSD contributor now. :D

What I want for 2026

I think that’s it, this is already more text than what I wrote the whole year in this blog! :P If you like to interact, find me on mastodon, send me a message, I am always open to new connections.