Welcome!

This is my personal blog, where I’ll be sharing tutorials from my projects, extra content from my talks, and random experiments with MicroPython, 3D printing, and electronics.

About me

For those who don’t know me yet, nice to meet you! I’m Juliana Karoline (also known as @julianaklulo on the internet), and I’ll be sharing a summary of my journey in technology.

How I discovered computing

Since I was a kid, I’ve always been interested in computers, probably because of my dad, who was always fixing computers and video game consoles when I was little.

I got my first computer on my 7th birthday, and at 11 I took a professional IT course (the kind meant for people entering the job market). It was funny because I was much younger than everyone else in the class, but still really eager to learn everything.

I learned a lot, which helped me understand how computers work. The coolest part was the hardware module, where I learned to completely disassemble and reassemble a computer.

High School and Technical Course

It felt natural to choose a Technical Program in IT at the Technical School in my hometown (Franca/SP, Brazil), since I imagined it would be focused on hardware repair. But I was surprised to discover programming: a concept I had never even thought about before. Learning to code changed my life, and it gave me the certainty that this was what I wanted to do for a living.

During the course, I spent a lot of time with classmates from the Mechatronics course, and that was when I discovered it was possible to combine hardware and software projects. My final project focused on this: we built a circuit to trigger a siren, controlled by a Visual Basic application. Around that time, I discovered Arduino, which opened my mind to more complex microcontroller projects (our final project only used a transistor switching a relay based on serial port input).

In high school, I visited the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) on a field trip organized by school. That day, I met students from the Computer Engineering course who were showcasing lots of robotics projects at their booth. I was very impressed, and at that moment I decided that this was the degree I wanted to pursue.

University

I studied Computer Engineering from 2014 to 2019. But even after 5 years in the course, I still had 50% left to complete because of one subject: Physics I.

I really struggled with physics, and failing it blocked the rest of the engineering curriculum, which depended heavily on physics as prerequisites for other key subjects.

It was really sad, but I decided to switch to Computer Science, which has the same computer classes but without the engineering specific subjects. I knew this would make it harder to work with hardware in the future, but I’d still be able to work in programming and continue my embedded systems projects as a hobby.

Python

While still in college, I co-founded PyLadies São Carlos, one of the first PyLadies chapters in Brazil. I also co-founded grupy-sanca (São Carlos Area Python User Group). Through Python, I discovered MicroPython, which became one of my greatest passions.

Being able to use the full power of Python on microcontrollers was the best of both worlds, since I could take everything I had learned from the Python community and apply it to embedded development.

MicroPython

My friends in the Python community encouraged me to share my projects at conferences. I gave my first talk at Python Brasil 2016, where I spoke about IoT development with Intel boards that, unfortunately, never ended up supporting MicroPython.

At Python Brasil 2019, I began my journey of promoting MicroPython, and since then I’ve been bringing projects to national and international conferences.

I’ve had the honor of presenting MicroPython technical content twice at PyCon US, the largest Python conference in the world. And I continue to do my best to inspire more people to dive into this world!

About this blog

I plan to post content in both English and Portuguese whenever possible, since I give talks in both languages (available on the Talks and Tutorials page). I’d like to reach people who have seen my presentations in either language.

Feel free to reach out to me about any of the posts published here. You can find me everywhere as @julianaklulo.

I hope this content is useful to you, and that it inspires you to create your own projects!