Hello, automator.

I've been automating things for a while now. I started as a full-stack developer, after a six-month course at Portugal's public employment and vocational training institute. I did some product work, then got pulled into systems administration, and that's where it hit me: there was a mountain of work being done by hand, even at tech companies. So I started building automations, for myself and for my colleagues. Goodbye to the boring part, hello to time for the interesting stuff.

At home I built my homelab and turned it into a testing ground for everyday life. I went back to university for a Computer Engineering degree, which gave me the foundation to actually understand the problems I was solving (and to solve them with fewer duct-tape fixes). When AI showed up, I came back to product work, now with more mileage and one heck of an ally: AI itself.

Today I'm starting this blog to document all of it in public: the workflows, the experiments, and the failures that always come bundled in.

What this is

It's not a tutorial factory. It's not a polished feed of strategic takes. It's where I show the automations I build, the tools I test, and the ideas I prototype. When something breaks, and it will, that goes here too. You learn far more from that than from a gallery of success stories.

The format is simple: show the problem, show the code, and be honest about what worked and what didn't.

Where I'm at right now

I haven't shipped anything to production yet. There are ideas taking shape, some with AI, others around things I use every day that are still more manual than they should be. As soon as one of them is real enough to talk about, it shows up here with the full story: the before, the during, and the stumbles.

Why build in public

Because I've learned more from one honest failure post than from any "10 best practices" article (I'm not saying I won't produce them though). If I document the whole process (the detours, the rate limit that caught me at 2 a.m., the trigger logic I rewrote three times), maybe someone saves a few hours of debugging. And if that someone is me six months from now, even better.

Let's get to it

If you already automate things, or you're curious and want to start, you're in the right place. The posts will be practical, the code will be real, and the failures come included.

Let's automate the boring stuff. See you soon.