A little bit more than three years ago, I left, I would say, a promising career in the web industry to start a PhD. Some friends told me that was crazy. But, a doctorate was something that I have always wanted and it would have been probably the last chance to do that. Besides that, from a personal life perspective, it was a perfect moment.

So, in November 2017, I left Cuponomia, a company that I helped to create, in Brazil to start my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Xiaofeng Wang on software engineering for startups in Bolzano, Italy. After a difficult start where, for several times, I felt a bit lost of what my research would be, I managed to have paper accepted in some top journals and conferences.

Some weeks ago, I started the process of thesis writing. Here in the Faculty of Computer Science of Unibz, we have to prepare what we call a hybrid PhD thesis in the sense that we must write a monograph but based on a set of publications. So, instead of putting some papers together as a per-publication PhD, we have to write the thesis as a single, monolitic text. In this process, I realized how many things I learned during the PhD that will not be part, or just touched upon, in the final thesis. But, I thought that it would be interesting to keep them registered somehow. So, I decided to write this blog.

Here, I plan to write down my experience in the PhD process more or less chronologically. I will not focus on those well-known aspects of a PhD candidate life such as the high and lows, the moments of joy and despair, etc. These stories are everywhere. I will focus on things that I had contact with that I found interesting but won’t fit my thesis. I will also use this space to write my results in a more friendly way to the general audience. I hope this content is useful to others either for their work life in a startup or academia or for their PhD process.