My name is Rui Barbosa Martins and I was born in Porto, Portugal. I studied Engineering/Computer Science at Faculty of Engineering at the University of Porto and completed my last term internship at Microsoft Development Center in Copenhagen, Denmark.

I stayed at Microsoft for a total of one year and a half where I wrote from scratch a parallel constraint solver and worked in other really nice technologies.

After that I moved to Google in the London Office where I designed and developed software from October 2007 to October 2012. At Google I worked in a handful of cool projects such as:

• YouTube Mobile applications for Android, J2ME, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows.
• Voice Search and Speech Synthesis servers.
• Android Market (aka Google Play) server side.
• Realtime/low latency data streaming service (PubSub style).
• YouTube video processing service.

After Google I decided to move to the Skype Division at Microsoft (November 2012) to work on an ultra cool and challenging project on Big Data for Skype. Created from scratch with my team a realtime system that handles 1 millions request per second at peak time and hundreds of Terabytes of data per day. Loads of super cool technology and a lot of server dark magic to deal with the scalability of all this. Above it all, a super fun project to learn and work on.

Two years and a half fast forward and I decided it was time to try new challenges and learn new things. And this brought me to Facebook. There I had a chance to work in the internal infrastructure for high availability, huge scale and low latency distributed systems.

Finally, in 2019, an opportunity came along to join Apple and help with their high-quality awesome products – I did not look back and have been having an amazing time ever since. 🙂

Game programming is probably what most attracts me in a computer science. Not just the fancy graphics but all that it takes to bring up a game: low level optimization, sound, networking, 3d modeling, design… It just seems to spread out across all computer science subjects. On top of all this, I guess it’s just really gratifying to end up with a game that will entertain several people!

Outside computer world, I really love practicing sports. I played amateur football and basketball when I was a kid but eventually abandoned it (I guess I wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer 🙂 ). Nowadays I play football, tennis, ping pong, squash and badminton with my friends on a regular basis – apart from being great fun it also helps me keeping in shape (and away from the gym :S ).

Music wise I am pretty much not picky at all. I tend to like bands like Radiohead, Muse, Coldplay, Metallica, Thievery Corporation, … Some of these genres are quite different but I guess it’s just nice to have music that goes with all sorts of moods I might be in. 🙂

My all time favorite composer by a long distance is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and I particularly like the 1812 Overture and Symphony 5.

I also love reading a lot. My favorite author is Douglas Adams. If you’re not up for the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” or “Dirk Gently”‘s novels you should try reading “Last Chance to See…” where Douglas narrates his trips around the world to find species on the brink of extinction. Another author I really like is Albert Camus – I find that his book “The Stranger” is just brilliant. Apart from that I read a bit of everything – Kafka to Lord of the Rings books.

Going to the cinema and movies in general is also one of my favorites hobbies. I really love movies like Good Will Hunting, Dead Poet’s Society, How’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Nausicaa Valley of Wind, … These last ones are rather cartoony but really really good. Again here, I’m not too picky about movies that entertain me. Anything that does not prove to be dull as hell is good enough for me!

I guess that’s pretty much it. Congratulations if you managed to read this far!!! 🙂

email: ruibm@ruibm.com