ARPILF Non-Profit Rebuild
Migrated a legacy Joomla site to Hugo/Tailwind with DecapCMS, CI/CD pipelines, and full IT management for an IPSS.
Hugo
Tailwind
CI/CD
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Makitall
Desenrascanço — the art of figuring it out, no matter what.
Database Reliability Engineer
I'm Sérgio Gonçalves — a DBRE who keeps mission-critical databases running with the resourcefulness of a Portuguese desenrasca mindset. From handball courts to production incidents, I bring calm under pressure and a get-it-done attitude. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
View ProjectsProfessional Path
2005 – 2012
Professional Handball Player
Ginásio Clube do Sul
Operating under extreme pressure on the court translates directly to incident response and managing mission-critical databases. Split-second decisions during a match mirror the urgency of a production outage — there is no pause button, only the next play.
The desenrasca mentality — adapt, improvise, and get it done — was forged here. Years of competitive handball taught discipline, teamwork under fire, and the ability to stay calm when everything is on the line. These are the same instincts that kick in at 3 a.m. when a primary database cluster decides it has had enough.
2012 – 2015
Sysadmin
The first step into IT — learning the ropes by keeping systems alive and users happy. From racking servers to writing shell scripts that saved hours of manual work, this was where the desenrasca mindset met the command line.
Every broken print queue and mysterious network outage was a lesson in troubleshooting under pressure. The adaptability built on the handball court found a new arena: production environments that never sleep and users who always need things fixed yesterday.
2015 – 2019
Infrastructure Engineer
Scaling up from individual servers to entire infrastructure fleets. This role meant designing resilient systems, automating deployments, and learning that the best incident is the one that never happens.
Infrastructure at scale demands the same resourcefulness that desenrasca is all about — when a data centre migration hits an unexpected wall at midnight, you improvise, adapt, and push through. The transition from reactive sysadmin work to proactive infrastructure design laid the foundation for reliability engineering.
2019 – Present
Full-Blown DBRE
The destination where every previous chapter converges. Database Reliability Engineering is the art of keeping data infrastructure running smoothly at scale — from query performance tuning and replication topology to disaster recovery and capacity planning.
The journey from the handball court to the DBRE console is a story of desenrasca in action: the pressure of competition, the grit of sysadmin firefighting, and the strategic thinking of infrastructure design all feed into making databases reliable, observable, and resilient. This is where the “Proper Grumpy DBA” earns the title — by getting it done, no matter what.
Projects
The Ultimate Home Server
Self-hosted home automation with Home Assistant and photo management, running on Docker and Linux with PostgreSQL for data persistence.
Docker
Home Assistant
Linux
PostgreSQL