In our latest Pretty Brilliant People interview, we sit down with Felipe Souza, Back-End Developer at Pretty Technical. With over a decade of experience working on distributed systems and high-availability services, Felipe brings deep technical expertise across Go, Node.js, Kafka streaming, and cloud-native infrastructure.
What first drew you to backend engineering?
I love business logic. For me the best part of programming is understanding the stakeholder's problem and trying to resolve it in the best way possible. To stay close to these types of problems, I naturally gravitated towards backend systems. Also, I don't like CSS.
What's the biggest challenge when modernising legacy systems?
In my experience it's never just one problem, but a couple of them. The most present challenge is never losing touch with the focus of what modernising is. It's easy to modernise for performance, but in doing so you can lose a well-rounded solution in the process.
What do you enjoy most about building high-availability backend services?
The thing I most enjoy is that when you are dealing with these types of systems, you are obligated to deal with top-notch technologies and processes!
Why are developer experience and clean architecture so important?
Software is something that needs to change. If the business changes, the software needs to change as well — if not, we would call it HARDware! The processes we learn to write better software are there to help us change more quickly and effectively.
Outside of engineering, what do you enjoy?
I'm a nerd, so playing video games, watching movies, animes and reading fantasy books are my passion.
What's one thing people might be surprised to learn about you?
Underneath the skin of a high nerd programmer I love pop artists and musicals. My favourite musicals are Hamilton and High School Musical, and my favourite artists are Michael Jackson, BTS and Ariana Grande!