All the way from Fortaleza, Brazil, Raphael Souza first came to Canada back in 2014 to complete a certificate in mobile development on Vancouver Island, he said, “I always heard that there were programs to come here and I researched for Canada and it seemed to be a great place so that became a dream of mine to come here. That was my goal.”
He then later went back to Brazil to finish off his Bachelor’s degree in computer science at the State University of Ceará. After 4 months of working remotely, he made his way back to Canada once again in late April 2018 to work at Guaraná’s head office in Montreal.
Raphael found his passion for app development playing video games as a kid. The game “Half Life” was a personal favourite of his that first sparked his interest, he said, “I realized that programming was something really powerful and a way to be creative because I can get to create stuff from scratch and this is an amazing feeling. It feels really good.”
At Guaraná, Raphael develops iOS apps using Swift, he works on Node.js servers and often times he teaches and trains the new developers that come in. This past month was apparently quite arduous, which is why Raphael is the proud recipient of “Bro of the Week” for his hard work and dedication for getting through the tough time at work.
Despite some of the demands that come along with app development, Raphael says having the opportunity to work with so many apps is a rewarding experience, “Because many apps equal many designs and they sometimes can be challenging.”
As a developer there are different tools Raphael likes to use such as Xcode, Sketch for design files, external text editors like Atom to write script or anything to do with non-Swift code and Stack Overflow is another tool he says, “It’s really useful, you’re not a programmer if you don’t know Stack Overflow.”
Raphael is always ready to learn and often uses recommendable resources like Ray Wenderlich, which is a helpful site offering tutorials for advancing programming techniques and showing new ways to apply technologies. To boost his skills, Raphael also reads PDF books and takes free courses on Coursera, where he is currently taking classes on Node.js. He also highly recommends looking at Swift documentation for help and GitHub for open source projects and going through someone else’s code.
After our interview, Raphael imparted some advice for students wishing to become app developers in the future, “Study a lot, try to find a way to improve your life with an app and write it.”
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