Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

Mind the doors, please. Mind the closing doors!

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 08:13:02 +0000

This is an amazing story about an incredibly boring individual — Or is it the other way around?

It brings us back to September 2012. I had just completed a chapter of my life that consisted of being constantly divided between finishing my degree in Computers Engineering and working on the overwhelming passion of making music (see my stuff). I didn’t exactly enjoy the former but I couldn’t make a living of the latter. It’s not that I didn’t like programming — I always did and I’ve always been pretty good at it. It’s just that I can’t see my life as numbers and calculations, so I tend to look at computer programming and music in the same way: I love creating things in my mind and then bringing them to life.

When I graduated, I decided that I should live abroad for a while and enrich my academic background a little further. The location seemed pretty obvious: I’d been to London before a few times and I fell in love with the city and the atmosphere (not so much with the weather), so that was my immediate choice. I completed a Masters degree in Web Development (with Distinction and with the faculty’s award for best masters project, which I’m legally obliged by my mom to state in public as often as possible) and the experience was amazing. It allowed me to specialise in a more creative area within computing and that made me feel good again about my education choices. I finally knew exactly what I wanted to do.

It was time to go back to Portugal, which I had learn to miss.

Back in sunny Portugal for a couple of weeks I started to realise that going back home right after the masters wasn’t really getting the most out of the whole UK experience, so I decided to start looking for jobs in London. It was my first time looking for a job which meant that I had no expectations whatsoever. I had a couple of Skype interviews — yes, I was wearing my pyjamas on my first ever job interview — and a couple of days later I had a job offer. This was the start of a crazy couple of weeks that led to me going back to London and staying on a tiny hotel room with no windows while going to a couple more interviews, refusing the initial job offer on the last minute and accepting a role at Monocle instead.

Almost 9 months later I handed in my resignation letter — I was offered something better and more exciting somewhere else. Portugal? Not just yet. There’s not a day that goes by without me thinking about Portugal and how much I want to go back, but it’s still not the time. There’s still room for me to grow here as a professional and maybe there’s still room for Portugal to stabilise a bit more. I don’t know when that will happen, but whenever I book my final flight to OPO I don’t want to book a return.

Eduardo Bouças, Web Developer, London

This post is a part of a series of guest articles entitled “a country of emigrants and a world of stories“. You can find the whole stories here.

“My comfort zone became too uncomfortable”

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:00:25 +0000

Ignore what the prime-minister said: you don’t have to leave Portugal. If you want to be 20 minutes away from your friends’ birthday celebrations, to be with your family every weekend, to be the local with all the answers instead of the inquisitive foreigner, stay. It’s OK to stay. I wanted to. Until my comfort zone became too uncomfortable and I had nothing left holding me back.

If you would have asked me two years ago if I would consider moving to Singapore, my reply would have been a decisive “No”. How about without a job waiting for me on the arrival? “No way!”

It’s been over a month since I moved here and I haven’t had a single moment of regret. I’m told that the first three months abroad are the honeymoon phase, so I’m only half way. But I know I thought this decision thoroughly. There is a portuguese advert where Cristiano Ronaldo says “Invest in yourself”. It’s for a bank, not even mine, but I did it anyway. I bet all my savings in my experience, talent and determination, and here I am.

Life in Singapore is very different because my attitude is too. I do things here that I never did in Portugal, from sharing an apartment with four complete strangers to reaching out to meet as many people as I can.

If I had to give any advice it would be: be prepared. Visit the country first and gather as much money as you can. Don’t come if you don’t like the weather – I love it. Prepare to be humble. When you are the outsider you don’t know better, you know different. And they may or may not care about your points of view (it’s in their right not to). You are away to learn and to accept new rules. Not to complain about the prices of beer, wine, coffee, cheese or rent (though you certainly will). They will be nice and show interest in your culture at first but don’t expect it to become the beginning of a lasting friendship.

When leaving your own country, it helps to think that you can always abort the emigration mission or that it’s only temporary. I understand now that – for all of us – the odds of going back to Portugal are very slim. After broadening your horizons chances are that you will either stay here or go somewhere else, while the dream of returning to Portugal drifts away.

And that is why it’s more than OK to stay in Portugal. But if you do, please don’t whine so much. Enjoy it for me. Keep it a good home to come back to.

Claudia Ribeiro, Creative Copywriter, Singapore

This post is a part of a series of guest articles entitled “a country of emigrants and a world of stories“. You can find the whole series here.

A country of emigrants, and a world of stories

Fri, 04 Oct 2013 19:39:18 +0000

Lately I have been stumbling upon a number of news articles about Portugal, about the economic crisis, about how the portuguese are leaving home in search for a better life.

The first was from the Financial Times, Portugal sees exodus of skilled workers seeking better prospects. Next came the New York Times with a less gloomy perspective, After a Recession in Portugal, the Tiny Green Fruits of Success. There are others I am sure, but I don’t feel they are telling the whole story.

Sure, there are nurses and designers who left the country to work, companies that in the midst of the economic desertification found a way to survive. But there are others whose path was not so cut and dry as the articles make it seem, there are people who decided to leave the country not because life wasn’t good but because it was time to expand. I had friends leave the country before there was even a recession, for example.

And it got me thinking, I could look at a map and pin at least 10 people I miss. From marketeers to teachers, advisors and IT professionals, designers and developers.

So I reached out to them, and asked if they would be interested in contributing with a point of view for this blog. Quite a good number said yes, even after admitting first that they had never written an article for a blog.

Please stay tuned, this is going to be interesting.

Photo by Pedro Pinheiro.