About Andre Faca

Alright, talking about me isn’t easy and definately not the best job for me.

Languages: English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and a little bit of everything else (almost!)
Job Title(s): Systems Administrator Level II, Web Developer
Location:: Barreiro, Portugal

The Full Story:
I was born on the May 10th, 1984; in Barreiro, a small city then (not that small today) belonging to the district of Setúbal.
Needless to say, this was a really small time compared to what it is today. In fact, Barreiro was mainly the city of factories’ employees at the time. My family was just one of those few who actually selected Barreiro to stay at the time.

My computer life started when my uncle showed me a ZX Spectrum, which was obsolete at the time but I managed to become a pretty advanced user on it. I got totally fascinated with BASIC programming.

(This is the exact model I had - ZX Spectrum 128K)

After a few years of goofing around with that and a dozen of game consoles (Master System, Game Gear, Mega Drive, Saturn), I convinced my dad to spend 350,000$00 PTE (€1.500,00 EUR today) for my first PC.

After playing around with Windows for so long, I started to code really basic applications, and tweaking others as well for my own needs. One of the cherries of the cake has been UTScript which was basically a modified version of mIRC and became extremely popular in the Portuguese gaming community. So much that people cared to hack it so they wouldn’t ask me for a license. I was pretty unmotivated due to that fact and dropped its development just as soon as I seen that happening.

On 1998 I moved to the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg where I finished High School and became officially pro-efficient on 3 languages: English, French, German.

I had already a great english knowledgebase on my mind but going to Luxembourg has helped it a lot since I was forced to speak english at least for my first 6 months there. (No one would understand Portuguese there - of course)

(This was where I studied for my last year in Luxembourg)

I started to work as a Webmaster for Latin Spirit ASBL, which was at the time and is still being managed by a great guy named Freddy Cedano. He was actually more of a friend rather then a boss, and the opportunity he gave me at the time forced me to learn more about advanced HTML and Flash technologies. Still, this wasn’t enough for me so I started to work as a partner for All Media Studios. Justin Durban gave me incredible advice (I wonder if he even remembers), especially on the graphical part. He’s still a big inspiration for me nowadays, not as a designer but as a musician, where I believe he’s a master at.

I later on moved to Belgium, and aside others I met 2 of my best friends to date - Christophe Printz and Ronald Marcucci.
Christophe is by far the best programmer I know, while Ronald is a great art/fantasy/sci-fi/abstract designer.

The tips and tricks I’ve learned from both were… priceless. I still use all the tips they gave me today.
Christophe particularly always helped me to improve and has always been solid with his constructive-criticism.

I started my System Administrator career a few months after being in Belgium, and worked for the following companies: LenZ MultiMedia (defunct), AcroLive OutSource, Lunarpages.com and HostGator.com, LLC.

While working at HostGator.com, LLC I decided to get back to my country. This was discussed at the time with HostGator’s CEO, who didn’t see any problem, so I scheduled the flight. I landed in Portugal on the September 11th, 2005 (pretty hard to forget such a date, eh?). I was housed temporarily by a close friend, Rui Rocha who is now the CEO of HighBrand, a successful portuguese outsource group.

It’s now almost 2008, so I am in Portugal for over 2 years.
Recently I was invited by Applied Innovations to join their Windows System Administration team, which I accepted with joy and plan to be there for a long time definately.

Windows is still a challenge for me as I was used to a Linux-Only environment, but I have to say that I’m doing pretty good there. Let’s see how things go, I might even want to get an MS Certificate

That’s pretty much about it. Short story with thousands of details hidden that wouldn’t be of any interest for you, the reader.

People that contributed somehow to my career and deserve a special thanks:
» Debora Fernandes
» Frederic Burnet
» Pedro Pinto
» Rishi Arch
» Christophe Printz
» Ronald Marcuci
» Brian Tracy
» Shashank Wagh
» Abhilash P
» David Strang
» Seamon X

(Hope I didn’t forget anyone - if I did please remind me!)