At the end of 1998, I got a job at IRB, the Instituto Brasileiro de Resseguros (Brazilian Reinsurance Institute), a Brazilian monopoly that still is the largest Reinsurance company in Latin America and one of the largest in the world, and when I was hired, I didn’t even know it existed or what Reinsurance was.
They wanted to add Network and Internet to the company, and I was hired to provide support and train the support team on the Internet due to my experience at Openlink, my previous job. So, in the first year, I basically worked in support, both training the team on everything related to the Internet and doing a little bit of everything, including installing network cards in the company’s machines.
At the end of 1999, I was graduating and thinking about making games, going to the US to study and pursuing a career in making games. I had chosen to work in support so that I would have more time to study on my own, in addition to not jeopardizing my college education, something I saw happen repeatedly with many friends who worked in development.
By chance, the IT General Manager saw me playing my game, which was my final project in college, and impressed, he invited me to work in development in 2000, as they were putting together a new team to develop a new unified web system for the company, which until then had been on the Jurassic IBM/Mainframe system.
In this video below, I explain in detail how it all happened (in Portuguese only), and how I ended up in development.
In the early days of the year 2000, we dove deep into development. I even participated in the selection of the technology we used from that year onwards. I even worked a little with ASP and Perl, where I developed the company’s WebMail alone in Perl. Until we discovered ColdFusion, which proved to be far superior to its competitors, and it won my vote immediately, and ended up being the technology chosen by the company.
Initially, I worked directly for the IT Manager, creating small systems here and there, and even related to Digital Certification, which was still in its infancy at the time. It wasn’t long before he put me in charge of supporting the team that was being formed to develop the company’s main system, replacing the Mainframe. They were having a lot of difficulty migrating to the Web, where they were doing exactly as they had done on the Mainframe, and the navigation was very bad, and the Manager initially put me in charge of designing the entire navigation of what the new system would be like. As it became much better than it was, it made me one of the main developers of the SIN – Sistema Integrado de Negócios (Integrated Business System), which over the years became the largest and most complete Reinsurance system on the planet, where we received visits from several Reinsurance companies from all over the world curious about our system, including the largest of them, Swiss Re from Switzerland, which at the time had no branch in Brazil, mainly due to the monopoly, of course.
During the development of the SIN, I took about 3 courses on Reinsurance, from basic to advanced, which helped me a lot in the creation and expansion of the SIN, to make things increasingly automated and fail-safe. We decided that all access to the database would be done via Stored Procedures, which not only speeded up the system’s processing time, which was enormous, but also protected it. I participated in the entire definition and even coded many of the most important Stored Procedures in Oracle PL/SQL.
After the system was already quite stable, it was necessary to control access in each area, in addition to the Managers being able to grant access to their subordinates independently, with the creation of all the necessary hierarchy. To create this control system, the IT Manager assembled a top team to create it, which I had the honor of being chosen for development. Thus, CAS – Controle de Acesso a Sistemas(System Access Control) was created, which became the control system for the entire company in all ColdFusion systems.
All this control was done through Stored Procedures, and all hierarchical searches were done through recursive Stored Procedures developed by me. Since the database at the time was Sybase and there were certain limitations in removing accesses via Stored Procedures and also performance problems, we decided to completely migrate to Oracle, where we rewrote all Stored Procedures in Oracle PL/SQL, which made the system perform much better, in addition to allowing us to use several things present in Oracle that did not exist in Sybase.
As the system expanded and new employees joined the teams, there was a need for more efficient training. Since ColdFusion is not a widespread technology here to this day, almost no one who arrived had even heard of ColdFusion. That is why more experienced developers like myself also trained newcomers. But over time, they started to introduce smaller and simpler systems for newcomers to use, but they were very different from the SIN, where the more experienced employees were. So the Manager at the time asked me to create something to standardize, speed up and facilitate the creation of new systems, so that they would have the same design and navigation as the SIN, which the employees were already used to. With that, I created the MOD – Modelo(Model) system, where you developed any new system using the MOD, which was a great success story.
I worked for over 10 years at IRB, and during its last restructuring I was promoted to Technical Leader of Claims, where I led a team of about 6 developers dedicated to Claims and a few others who also worked with Business. But during all these years, I still developed many smaller systems, most of them in ColdFusion, such as migrating the turnstile system from Clipper to the web, and other very obscure ones, such as legacy systems in Delphi and even in Java using a framework created by Renato Mauro, which became known as RM, in addition to the aforementioned WebMail in Perl.
It was without a doubt one of the best places I have ever worked, both personally and technologically, where we had access to everything that was cutting edge on the market, many years ahead of the vast majority of Brazilian companies. In fact, we got to work for a few months side by side with Ben Forta, the greatest ColdFusion ambassador in the world at that time.
