Hello, I'm Bene.

My name is Felipe Benevides, a software engineer originally from Brazil and living in Amsterdam 🇳🇱

I fell in love with building digital products 10+ years ago when I first founded a mobile jukebox app called Vitrola in my hometown. We've raised some money from angel investors and went full-time on it for 2 years. Even though I failed, I learned so much from it that I decided to keep working with products.

That's why, over the past few years, I've been working with some incredible startups in Brazil—helping build them from the ground up and scaling them to reach millions of users. I've often taken on the role of an early-stage engineer, including at 99, which later became Brazil's first unicorn after being acquired by Didi Chuxing.

Currently, I'm helping small-scale farmers in Africa at Apollo as a software engineer.

As a product-minded engineer, I (really) enjoy writing code, discussing product development, experimenting with new technologies and working closely with operations and product teams to make a project a reality. I strongly believe engineers must be close to customers, understanding their pain points.

My current interests involve:

• High-throughput applications
• Distributed systems
• Team dynamics and engineering management
• Programming languages
• Product development
• AI Engineering, LLMs, etc.

Things I've already worked on:

• Programming languages: Java, Ruby, Kotlin, Scala, Golang and Python (not that much, though)
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Terraform, Docker
• Mobile development: built Android and iOS applications natively or using Flutter
• Frontend development: some small stuff with React and Vue.js

Here you're going to find my thoughts on software engineering, product development, and other topics I'm passionate about like music, surfing, and coffee ☕.