Life Lessons on Og Maciel's Journal

Trying to Read While Life Happens

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Trying to Read While Life Happens

Yesterday, after the long day I had, my wife, one of my daughters, and I went to a jazz concert at UNC, something my daughter needed to attend for one of her classes. It was scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m., with the UNC Jazz Band performing alongside special guest Alex Graham. Turns out the North Carolina Symphony was also in town performing in the larger, more modern adjacent theater, which meant it took us extra time to get there. Finding parking was especially hard, but thanks to the kindness of one attendant protecting the neighborhood lots from concert-goers, we managed to find a spot only a few minutes’ walk from the Moeser Auditorium.

No Is a Complete Sentence

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Park Troopers on Unsplash

Google Calendar says I spend an average of 20 hours a week in meetings. Add to that the fact that I have to block my own lunch just to prevent people from scheduling over it, and suddenly 25 hours of a 40-hour week are already spoken for. Then there are the ad-hoc calls that pop up out of nowhere and don’t even show up on the calendar. So I’m pretty convinced I actually spend close to 30 hours a week on Zoom/Meet/Teams/whatever-video-conferencing-platform-is-ruining-my-neck-that-day.

The Student in Me Never Left

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Library in the morning hours

This morning I started work late because I had to run a couple of errands. First, I was supposed to pick up my dad and take him to the mechanic so he could get his car, but it turns out the place only opened later and I couldn’t wait for it. So it was on to the second task of the day: taking my 18-year-old daughter to her school for an in-person exam.

Why Christmas Music Gets Me Every Time

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I know it may sound weird to start talking about Christmas when Halloween hasn’t even come up yet. But last night, while my oldest daughter was making dinner, she put on a Christmas station on Pandora—and just like that, I was transported straight into my first Christmas memory.

I must have been maybe five or six. And when I say I “remember” it, I’m not 100% sure if it’s a real memory or something I pieced together from old photos—but it feels real. Someone dressed as Santa Claus came to our house. To this day I don’t know if it was my dad, a friend of his, or someone my parents hired—but “Santa” showed up. And to my absolute shock, I got a G.I. Joe dressed in full camouflage, plus a yellow helicopter and a Jeep with some kind of weapon mounted in the back. This was the early 80s, so getting war-themed toys was totally normal. That’s the first Christmas I can truly recall.

My Origin Story: Baptism by Fire

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Hannah Gibbs on Unsplash

When I walked into Synaptic Pharmaceuticals for my first official software developer job interview, I had never written a line of professional code. I had no GitHub profile (it didn’t even exist yet), no computer science degree, and just a vague idea of what a design pattern was.

But I had something far more dangerous: momentum and an unlimited supply of hubris.

A few weeks earlier, I had built a working software system from scratch in a pharmaceutical lab despite having zero formal training. If I could do that, what couldn’t I do?

My Origin Story: From Syringes to Software

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Ousa Chea on Unsplash

“Sometimes the path finds you long before you recognize you’re walking it.”

I didn’t plan on becoming a software engineer. In fact, if you had met me as a teenager in Brazil—hunched over one of the many Encyclopedia Britannica volumes we had at home or scribbling chemical equations on scratch paper—I would have told you I was going to cure genetic diseases and start my own research lab in Australia. People from all over the world would fly there to be treated. All free of charge. That was the dream. Technology wasn’t even in the picture.

The Quiet Girl Who Changed My Life

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My wife and I couldn’t be more different from each other. She’s sweet, and I’m savory. She’s calm and easygoing, while I’m hyped up and intense. I talk a thousand miles an hour but am very much an introvert, whereas she chooses her words carefully and is a social butterfly.

I remember when I first met her. It was April 1999, and I had just agreed to go on a blind date with my friend’s sister’s best friend. I was going through a rough phase in my life—one where I’d pretty much given up on romance and decided to focus entirely on work. One of my sisters kept insisting that I should start dating again. She even set me up with someone she swore would be a good match, telling me we were both Geminis and that I’d just been “looking for the right person in the wrong places.” I wasn’t sure what to think of that at the time, but I went along with it. The date was pleasant enough—she was kind, we had a good time—but there were no sparks.