Platogo Blog

Hi! My name is Nuno Marques and I'm the new member of the Platogo family (second from the right). I'm going to talk a bit about myself and how I got here in Vienna. I'm originally from Portugal, of a small city, north of Lisbon, called Leiria.


Everything started when I got my first PC at age 11. My passion for computers was already big by then (my friends had Spectrums that I played with) but this led me to play around and have more fun whenever I wanted.

Years later, I went to Uni and there I first learned how to programme. My first language was Pascal. I was very happy whilst doing the Introduction to programming course and even solved all the problems in the course book.

Fast forward to 2004, when I was doing my masters, I was invited to assist in the course of Distributed Systems in my University. It was a great experience! Helping students and teaching them was something I really enjoyed.

I've decided, after that, that I wanted to move to the commercial world, rather than staying at the academic. My master thesis was the crucial decider.

I, then, joined a company called Link Consulting in Lisbon where I and a couple of workmates did a portal (Intranet) with 12 applications for a City Hall. At that time, most of the tools and frameworks were new to me, it was my first contact with the jee stack in the wild and with JUnit. It was when I started reading, massively, about software engineering and construction. I've now read about 250 books about it.

In 2006, a friend of mine challenged me to go with him to work in London. I accepted! Leaving behind a stable job, I bought my ticket to England without any interviews or job prospects. Five days before my trip, a recruiter found my CV online and called me up to see if I was interested in going for an interview at an IT company in the Insurance/Reinsurance market. That company was RI3K. Fortunately, I got the job and joined RI3K three weeks after Jakob (Platogo's CEO), we end up not coding a lot together but we had a lot of good discussions.

Jakob left London to start Platogo with Florian and I stood working for RI3K another year. In RI3K, I integrated Brit Insurance with our platform and partly integrated Catlin. I, also, left a mail templating infrastructure.

I, then, moved to Inspired where I led a team of 5 for a year and introduced a lot of controversial practices (for the company) like pair programming, test driven design, tools for customer acceptance testing like fitnesse and pushed for the highest possible quality without compromises. We created a bingo server which had around 50k LOC, a test coverage of 89% with a ratio around 2:1 between test and production code.

After that I worked for a bit more than 2 months on a highly accessed website, The Daily Mail, which gave me some insights and confirmations about how to build a website that scales up to hundreds of millions of page views per month.

In the mean time, Jakob had been really busy travelling and promoting Platogo and had no time to code. The need for a new experienced developer was growing and last December, he offered me a job at Platogo. After some deliberation I found that there were a lot of advantages to moving to Vienna and joining in. It's a great project and I'm very happy to join this small but very exciting company.

I'm very passionate towards technology and the whole making process of software. I joined the Software Craftsmanship movement in 2008, had been an active member, went to all conferences and met some of the best developers.

I like to try out new and different languages, pair programme with friends on my spare time and read software related books, blogs and papers.

I'm currently learning German!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Company. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.