From psychologist to developer: my career transition

Where it started

I spent six years as a hospital psychologist, most of it in trauma ICUs. It's work that demands fast decisions, a fine reading of what isn't being said, and the ability to stay level-headed when everything around you is in crisis. I liked the work — but at some point I realized I wanted to build things that outlasted a shift, things that could be reviewed, improved, versioned.

The leap

In 2021 I joined Kenzie Academy Brasil to study fullstack web development. It wasn't an impulsive decision: I'd already been testing the limits of my technical curiosity for a while, but that's where it became routine — programming logic, HTML/CSS, then JavaScript, databases, the first projects that broke and I had no idea why.

What nobody told me beforehand is that switching careers in your thirties isn't starting from zero. Six years of reading people under pressure, making decisions with incomplete information, and communicating hard things clearly quietly turned into working tools for software engineering too. Debugging is, in large part, hypothesis and reading signals. Interface design is, in large part, empathy for whoever's going to use it.

From bootcamp to fintech

My first job as a developer was at Onesight, in 2022, working with Vue.js and PHP/Symfony. From there I moved to Wealth99, an international fintech, where I spent three years building critical financial operation flows — migrating Vue 2 to Vue 3, integrating external APIs, working with teams spread across different time zones. Today I'm at Sovis, building APIs in Java Spring Boot and interfaces in Vue.js for a BI platform, and finishing an MBA in Microservices Architecture.

What I carry with me

I don't see psychology as a closed chapter. The analytical capacity under pressure I built in the ICU is the same one I use to debug a production system at three in the afternoon with users waiting. And the UX instinct — understanding that behind every screen there's a person trying to solve a real problem — is something I bring into every line of code I write.

This blog is going to be, among other things, a place to record that process: what I learn building systems, the problems I solve, and every once in a while, how these two careers keep talking to each other.