About

Interests

A few things I care about — tap any to read the note.

• Startups

  I can't resist the beginning of things — I spin up prototypes out of pure curiosity, mostly to validate an idea I'm turning over in my head. My drive is full of them: games like Dragon Scape, Quadra Monsters and Old West Tactics, web experiments like Wanna Migrate and GymGuardian, AI tools like BillBot and Undocking. I build them to prove the thinking works; what they usually lack isn't the code, it's a commercial reason to keep going.

• Software Engineering

  It still amazes me that I get to pay the bills building things that only ever existed in my head. Chasing how a system scales for millions pulls me all the way down to first principles — what a bit is, how it lives in memory, how a CPU chews through it, how it crosses the network to reach someone. That whole stack, trade-offs and all, is a craft I never get tired of.

• AI

  I fell for AI in a university classroom: a friend and I built a tiny fighting game — he did the graphics, I wrote the Q-learning — and ran it live in front of the class. Watching the agent teach itself that a low punch was the winning move for our setup was pure magic. I’ve been hooked on machines that learn on their own — and on optimizing things — ever since, now full-time through Aya.

• Self-Learning

  My “to-learn” list is endless and only ever grows, and the way I actually learn is by building. I keep circling back to the classics and the great minds who came before — Stoic philosophy, Charlie Munger’s mental models — as a compass for thinking clearly and living an ethical, virtuous life in a world full of noise.

• Self-Reflection & Philosophy

  Stepping back is the only way I know to get better at the things that matter most, like relationships. I practice it concretely — therapy, journaling, meditation, long honest conversations — and I think it should be a public priority: it almost feels wrong that someone can go through a whole life without ever seeing a psychotherapist.

• Physics

  I'm an enthusiast with no formal training, pulled along by a genuine need to understand how the world actually works — what's out there in the universe, and the older question underneath it: what existence even is, and why we're here at all. Relativity, cosmology, quantum foundations, the whole timeline of breakthroughs — I follow it for the wonder, not the credentials.

• Healthspan

  I want to grow old with vitality, and I care just as much about quality of life right now. In practice that’s a clean, light, gluten-free diet built around longevity — I haven’t eaten red meat, chicken or pork in over eight years — plus staying in motion, mostly by surfing.

• Being in the water

  The ocean is my church: everyone quietly facing the same direction, and on a flat day, sitting in a silence that feels like meditation. Maybe it’s in my blood — “sea” is mar in Portuguese, and I carry it in my name: Márcio starts with mar. I’ll be forever chasing that Endless Summer lifestyle, cold early mornings and all.

• Music

  There’s samba at the heart of it — the pandeiro, the roda, and lately dancing Samba de Gafieira. I’ve always played a bit of everything, and honestly the music never really stops around me.

• Art

  I have a bit of a da Vinci obsession: I believe every excellent piece of work lives at the intersection of art and science. I’m moved by beauty wherever it shows up — a painting, a game, a live spectacle — especially the sensibility an artist leaves in the details, the part that isn’t said out loud but still touches you. That, to me, is the whole reason it’s called art.