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Hello, friend.

Dreamer by film, engineer by code.

Rodrigo smiling at night by the Christmas tree in Praça do Comércio, Lisbon
The dreamer & The engineer
The line starts in 1996

The line so far

Seven stops between a 90s kid and here.

  1. 1996. A 90s kid

    Sometime in the 90s the computer came off the little table it shared with the telephone and onto a desk of its own. It happened in other kids’ houses around then too, and that was when I started using it.

    The first thing I changed was an open source fighting game I had downloaded. It worked, I liked it, and I had no idea that what I had just done was called programming.

    Rodrigo as a toddler in a pale blue shirt, in a studio portrait
    The 90s
    Rodrigo as a young boy in a navy bucket hat

  2. 2016. The dreamer and the engineer

    The house had a computer in the 90s and I had a laptop after that, but this was the first machine I built myself: an Intel i7, an ASUS motherboard, a GTX 960, bought piece by piece through 2015 and finished in January 2016.

    The web was the thing I could not look away from. Back then you picked Java or C++ to call yourself a developer, and HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript sat on the side, almost soft skills. With Flash on its way out I could see software moving into the browser instead of being downloaded and installed, so I put my time into the web instead of the safe choice.

    An Intel Core i7 processor box
    Sep 2015
    A GeForce GTX 960 graphics card box
    Dec 2015
    The finished computer on a desk, and Rodrigo smiling next to it
    Jan 2016
    Pascal code on a screen that converts decimal numbers to binary
    Pascal, Apr 2015

  3. 2017. Learning in public

    I had a badge when Web Summit came to Lisbon in 2016. Then came PHP that printed “Hello Friend”, a JavaScript game for a college project pushed to GitHub, and in 2018 a React calculator tagged #alwayslearning.

    A Web Summit 2016 attendee badge with Rodrigo’s name
    Lisbon, Nov 2016
    Mar 2017
    A browser game for two players with a life bar, built for college
    College, Dec 2017
    React code for a calculator in Visual Studio Code
    React, Apr 2018

  4. 2018. First flight, first internship

    Four in the morning by the Tagus, a friend said: you have to come visit me. I had never been inside an airport. A week later I bought the trip to Oslo blind.

    That summer I interned at AG Films, part of Artists Group, a film production company: Unity development, with web support on the side. The last day ended with a goodbye to a life-size Spock.

    Oslo, Feb 2018
    An equestrian statue before the Royal Palace in snow
    Oslo, Feb 2018
    A laptop on a wooden table at AG Films, with pinball machines behind it
    AG Films, Alcântara
    A life-size Spock figure standing by a sunny window
    Goodbye, Spock

  5. 2019. Paper first

    A summer internship at Red IT put Angular on my front end and .NET on my back end. That autumn I was drawing app flows on paper before writing a single line.

    Hand-drawn mobile app wireframes connected by blue arrows
    Nov 2019
    A minimal white desk with a monitor, keyboard and headphones
    Jan 2020

  6. 2021. A branding agency

    At Megabeetle®, a branding agency, I built with React, TypeScript and GSAP, and ran our sprints as Scrum Master. My own website that year opened with “Hello Friend, I’m Rodrigo Nave.”

    Rodrigo’s 2021 website greeting: Hello Friend, I’m Rodrigo Nave
    May 2021
    A hand holding a worn Pokémon cartridge above a Game Boy Advance SP
    Still saving, Mar 2021

  7. 2022. You are here

    I joined Sanjow in March 2022 as a full stack developer and I am still there, building with React, Next.js, Node.js and PostgreSQL, with AI agents helping us estimate, review and test.

    Rodrigo tipping a red Mario cap inside the Nintendo store in New York
    Nintendo New York, Oct 2022

Departures so far

Every time I see a plane in the sky I remember the places I have been, and start imagining the ones still to come.

The Copenhagen Opera House across calm harbour water
Copenhagen, Feb 2020
The Colosseum’s sunlit arches against a clear sky
Rome, Sep 2019
The Doric columns of the National Monument on Calton Hill
Edinburgh, Dec 2022
The Statue of Liberty against a pale blue sky
New York, Oct 2022
The Shard’s glass facade rising into grey cloud
London, Apr 2018
A statue silhouetted on Charles Bridge at sunrise
Prague, Jul 2018
Colourful Ribeira townhouses with iron balconies
Porto, Apr 2025
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral with its gold and green domes
Sofia, Dec 2021
An airliner crossing a blue sky, seen from below
Lisbon, Dec 2019
  • Oslo Norway2018
  • London England2018
  • Prague Czechia2018
  • Budapest Hungary2018
  • Paris France2018
  • Vienna Austria2019
  • Rome Italy2019
  • Copenhagen Denmark2020
  • Sofia Bulgaria2021
  • New York United States2022
  • Edinburgh Scotland2022
  • Porto Portugal2025

Also on the map: Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Work

  1. Current role: Aug 2025 – now

    Tech Lead

    Sanjow

    Leading the team after three years as a full stack developer there. Bringing AI agents into estimation, code review and QA.

  2. Current role: Mar 2022 – now

    Full Stack Developer

    Sanjow

    React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Mantine, Shopify Polaris, SWR, Node.js, Express, REST, Prisma, Redis and PostgreSQL.

  3. Jul 2021 – Mar 2022

    Web Developer

    Megabeetle®, branding agency

    React, TypeScript, GSAP, Chakra UI and Styled Components, plus Scrum Master duties.

  4. Jun – Aug 2019

    Frontend Developer, internship

    Red IT

    An Angular front end on a .NET back end.

  5. Jun – Aug 2018

    Unity Developer, internship

    Artists Group (AG Films)

    Game development and web development support.

Education: Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal

What I bring

Leading

At Sanjow I estimate and plan my own implementations and review the team's code, after three years building there as a full stack developer. As Scrum Master at Megabeetle before that, I ran the sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives.

A vintage Macintosh on a table, in black and white
Aug 2016

AI in the loop

Claude Code agents, custom skills and MCP, plus Cursor. Put to work on ticket estimation, historical context, implementation, code review, Playwright checks and Sentry triage.

Fifteen years of code

From Pascal exercises to Next.js in production, with GitHub, WebStorm, DataGrip, Postman, YouTrack and Jira as daily tools.

  1. 2015Pascal
  2. 2017PHPJavaScript
  3. 2018React
  4. 2019Angular
  5. 2021TypeScript
  6. 2022Next.js

Things that made me

“A director with a camera is as free as an author with a pen.”
Stanley Kubrick, quoted on my Instagram in 2016.

Trainspotting

Released in 1996, the year I was born. At 30 I wrote my own “Choose life”.

1996

Wes Anderson

Edinburgh felt like being inside one of his films, just without the symmetry.

2022

Rodrigo smiling in front of a comic-book mural of superheroes
Raised on stories

Say hello back.

Write to me about good code, good films, or a city I should see next.

rodrigonavecosta.1996@gmail.com