Marcelo Mateus da Cunha

Hello,
My name is Marcelo Mateus, I'm 31 years old, born in Rio de Janeiro. I have a degree in Social Communication with qualification for Advertising, but my focus has always been the digital life, since when I had to put a plastic cover in the computer after using it.

I had the opportunity to start working as web designer/web developer soon after finishing college and since then I have never left this area even though I went through some others.

I am completely crazy in love with everything that surrounds this connected world and mad about web development. It is fun and it gives me some money. What else could I ask for? I've started this crazy passion in 1998 reading some HTML code books to build some pages about Pokémon and it became visceral.

I used to say that this is the only area 100% resolved in my life. Leaving modesty aside, I have talent for the thing and I'm too curious about this subject, which gives me a surreal knowledge and motivation to always be searching for new things and renew the old ones.

With this and a three years experience working in a small digital agency where I was able to learn a daily routine of work, I gained the necessary baggage to command my own team and take full responsibility for a
school website, from the initial work frames to costumers feedback, through design, development and in
content insertion. With total freedom and confidence, I was able to perform a job recognised not only by the headmaster and owners of the college but also by the students with whom I would have a
quite different experience from what I was accustomed to. I was invited - and convinced - by the headmaster of this school to start teaching Advertising and Computer Science (web). Do I need to say that I also fell in love with the job as well? Between this two job and having enough work and pleasure with what I was doing, a teenage dream became possible.

Living abroad (outside Brazil) has always been a dream that I would like to accomplish one day, and when I had the financial opportunity to do it, I saved some money and did it. I choose London, because of my
Portuguese nationality and my English was not that bad. Even with fear, I left everything behind. House, friends, family... At the time I was 28 years old and I thought that after 30 this dream would become more impossible.

In the beginning, it would be just a three-month trip experience to know the city, improve my English and meet new people. But with two months living in the city, the money became rare. I started translating my resume, sending it to everywhere from web agencies to small restaurants. Then I've been called to work in a
coffee shop. And I did. And I did. But I only spent three days at the company. The job was not that difficult, but it wasn't for me. It was not my kind of thing.

Believing that this immigrant life wouldn't work for me, one month before going back to Brazil, I was invited to make a test in a web agency, where I was hard working for the last three years, with many emails in English, an huge experience and a lot of coffee and music.

Today, I feel myself completely able to have a job wherever I want to.