TriPagamentos

This was my first job in the field. Before Let's, my background was purely academic: Algorithms and Data Structures 1 and 2 in structured C, polymorphism, collections, and iterators in Java, starting to learn GUI development also in Java, Databases 1, 2, and 3, Research Methodology 1. Of web development, I knew almost nothing — I barely knew desktop development either. It was my close friend Gabriel Krysa who recommended me to Let's's owner at the time, Guilherme Mazur — without that recommendation I probably wouldn't have gotten started.

The first day

I came in as a fullstack developer, Laravel on the backend and Vue.js on the frontend, barely knowing anything about real web development. A colleague, Luiz, had enormous patience with me from minute one — on my first day he walked me through setting up the environment with Docker, and I actually tried editing a file inside the vendor folder (yeah). Carbon, Facades — the first concepts every Laravel dev learns the hard way, I learned right there.

Building from scratch

TriPagamentos hadn't launched yet when I joined — I spent my entire first month building new features, not redesigning anything. There was a PO managing the backlog at the time, who handed me tasks directly. I built the producer/co-producer/affiliate system (each role with its own view and permissions), automatic PDF watermarking to protect downloadable material, and dove headfirst into two integrations I'd never touched before: the Zoop payment gateway (boleto and credit card) and electronic invoice generation via Focus NFe — a ton of fields to map (issuer, recipient, transaction nature) without fully understanding half of what I was looking at. I also built the sales dashboard's first charts.

Launch day

We launched TriPagamentos in November 2020, and the rest of the month went into fixing the surprises that only show up with real users. After launch came upsells, pausing/resuming checkouts, an email alert for when a sold-out product came back in stock, discounts for returning students, expired boletos, one-CPF-per-account enforcement, and Facebook Pixel tracking.

Shifting focus to frontend

It was only much later — between December 2020 and February 2021, near the very end of my time at Let's — that the request I'd made to Mazur to focus more on frontend actually played out. In that phase we migrated the whole panel (member area and admin) to Tailwind CSS, working in parallel with other colleagues on different pieces of the same screen. The lesson-viewing screen inside the member area was the toughest of all — a custom-built sidebar component with almost 400 lines, which took me a good while to understand before I could even touch it. I ended up using Vuex to fix a sidebar bug that broke on mobile, and spent my last days hunting responsive bugs — z-index, overlays, grid breakpoints — literally through the week I left.

VS Cintos

Early on, I briefly touched another project, VS Cintos — a simple REST API, with routes for admin, client, and ambassador. I only built a handful of basic routes there; most of the work was a colleague's.

What stuck with me

I'll admit I still miss touching backend code every now and then. It was at Let's that I learned, hands-on and with no safety net, what it actually takes to build and keep a real system running from the ground up — and it was there, especially in that final frontend stretch, that I discovered I wanted to build a career in it.