About

Hi!,

My name is Daniel Fernandes Gomes, I was born in 94 and I’m from S. Paio de Oleiros; a northen, near the coast, Portuguese town. Though, many times you may also find me using my alias, Danfergo, which is the agglutination of my full name.

My memories begin with me launching my little toy cars against the wall and playing with everything else I could find at home. Tying chairs and tables with wool yarn was a trend back then.

Around eight, I’ve my bike’s tire flattened and from their on that was my main toy. I’ve self-learned how to take it apart, fix it and a few years later reinventing it as a tricycle with a steering wheel from an old car.

At this age, I was studying at the elementary schools of S. Paio de Oleiros and Santa Maria de Lamas (latest year) while attending “sunday school”, which I kept attending until my 9th grade.

The next studying cycles happened at Colégio Liceal de Santa Maria de Lamas, where I was doing enough to keep reasonable grades while I would be joining a few clubs, in different years: history, english and arts. A lot more seriously, I’ve joined theatre group where I stayed until the end of the high-school, performing during 5 and half years, around 10 different plays.

At 15, when the social network Hi5 was at its pick, I’ve found the CSS “codes” and browser source view. I was amazed by It and I’ve embarked on this new learning through hacking path. About a year latter I was publishing tutorials on Youtube and on TOUTLOUD, a forum which I created with the help of a few friends and reached around 2500 users. This motivated me to learn my first programming languages: JavaScript and Php. The forum died when the social network disabled HTML/CSS support.

Around this age I joined the handball teams, at school and at CDC S. Paio de Oleiros though, for logistic reasons It didn’t last one full year. Next I took on classic guitar lessons at TUNA Musical Group from S. Paio de Oleiros, for two years. This led me to, with friends, create COCKAINE,a rock music band. I left after a few months.

Since early, I’ve questioned every conception it was purposed to me — that’s stupid, was my usual welcome message. But more than put in question I love to propose, dream about and build my own ideas. Specially for problems that even after long periods of reflection keep staying stupid.

At my ninth grade I started questioning students association and that led me to, at eleventh, with the help of friends, run for president. Why not?… And we totally lost. But with the lessons learned and contacts established we decided to run once again. We won. I was the president of students association that year; and what a year we: organized two major parties (w/ crowds over 1500 people), a LAN Party sponsored by the town hall and an ISP provider, provided logistic support and were the representatives on the national secondary festival, as well other smaller events.

From early I wanted to be an engineer and he only options where what branch: mechanical, electrical, computers, etc. Though, three main points quickly help me take that decision:

1. My background with web programming and how much I liked it.
2. I spent a lot of time thinking about existential questions such as life and death, intelligence and consciousness. I looked to computers with the same intrigue as I looked to people and figure it out that maybe by understanding better computers I could understand better people.
3. All my craziest ideas would involve some sort of Artificial Intelligence.

When the university came, my marks weren’t enough to enter the faculty I have initially chosen, Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto (FEUP). Yet I was able to enter a neighbour school, Institute of Engineering of Porto, where I made the first year. Then I requested transfer to FEUP were I’m making the final four years of the course Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering.

Meanwhile I’ve been participating with friends, each year, on the Porto Summer Of Code competition, having conquered the second place on the first attempt. I’ve also been participating in other middle year competitions.

Since the summer of 2015 I’ve also been working with university professors, under three initiation research grants, on a web platform for the support of wind flow modeling experimental campaigns. Here the technologies used were AngularJS and NodeJS based.

This a bit of who I am. At least so far.

If you think that you might have common interests with me, don’t hesitate in contacting me.

Think less, talk less, do more.
Daniel

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