I'm Erika, a Brazilian living in The Netherlands since 2012. Mostly self-taught, I started my career as a systems administrator and moved to software engineering with PHP shortly afterwards. I worked many years as a full stack web developer, but my career changed a lot when I moved to Amsterdam 8 years ago - I was finally able to attend PHP conferences, I got to watch talks from people who were my role models, and I made great friends in the AmsterdamPHP user group. That inspired me to become a conference speaker, which opened many doors and empowered me to follow my passion for teaching.

I've always enjoyed creating technical and educational content, and some time later came the opportunity to work as technical writer for the DigitalOcean community, where I am today.

I started using Laravel in personal projects so that I could write about it. The good thing about my job is that I get to research and learn about a lot of different things, so that I can write about them. I ended up falling in love with Laravel, because of how practical and fast it is to create applications using this framework. Programming to me me is, above everything, a creative pursuit. Being able to prototype faster gave me the ability to focus on what I really wanted to build.

I have plenty of hobbies but not much time to dedicate to them; lately I've been really into video games because I can play with my 4 year old daughter, and she really enjoys that. I am also a beginner surfer, and that to me feels a lot harder than coding!

My recent Laravel series at DO: Digital Ocean tutorial series