Hello, my name is Annanda. I was born in the Northeast of Brazil (Maranhão), and I lived for many years in Rio de Janeiro.
My father chose my name, and it means bliss: “perfect happiness, great joy”. Who knows me in person will agree that my name’s meaning describes me very well. I love to smile.
I have a degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) - the achievement I’m proudest of until this day.
I’m currently a PhD candidate at NUI Galway in Ireland. In my research, I’m investigating how to create a multimodal emotion detection system for children with autism.
My first contact with any kind of computer coding was with HTML, around 2001. Around 2010, I enrolled in some HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP courses. At that time, I did a lot of websites using WordPress.
I’ve been programming using Python since 2014. During some time, I was very active in the Brazillian Python community: I organised Python and Django workshops, delivered presentations, and attended several Python Con Brazil and other local Python events. And I was a co-founder of Pyladies Rio back in 2015. I was also part of the Brazilian Python Association’s board (Associação Python Brasil). All of that was before starting my PhD.
I was an intern in two different industry companies during my college times. I had experience with Java web development, dealing with clients, and Ruby web development in the first one. I worked with technical writing and Javascript development in the second one. After that, I was an intern in a research centre, working on a European research project. That’s when I fell in love with research and decided to pursue a PhD degree. There, I worked with AI, machine learning and natural language processing. I was also involved in academic writing (papers and project reports), and I had the most amazing coworkers.
I’m married to Felipe; we have been together for more than ten years now! He is my favourite human being.
In this blog, I write a bit about everything that I love: books, technology, programming, organising, productivity, photography and any other random obsession I might be hooked into at the moment. I always have at least one active obsession, which I’ll talk about it non-stop, and I will want to learn everything there is to know about that.
To check what I’m doing now, please go to my Now page.