Story
I was a little girl who really liked math.
Then I was a teenager who really liked math and computers.
I finished high school and had to pick between math and computers. I picked Computer Science.
hello!Hello!
My name is Gabriela Moreira, I live in Brazil and I really like software. I co-founded a company called Quint to help developers make trustworthy software.
I'm very passionate about the tools that I use: NixOS, Emacs and XMonad. My config files are all here.
Here's sort of how my professional life went so far.
University started and two things caught my attention in the very first semester:
- Competitive programming (ICPC). I'm not a competitive person but the team work and challenges were really fun!
- Functional programming, because someone gave a talk about Haskell at some random event and I got obsessed. I was still learning how to write my fibonaccis in C at that time, so I learned Haskell almost as a first programming language and that made it much easier to learn!1 They've actually incorporated this into my university's curriculum now and students also learn functional programming in the first semester, which is great.
A couple of years passed with me having fun, exploring some Linux distros and nerding out in the corridors. I started taking the class where we're actually supposed to learn Haskell. The professor, Cristiano, was impressed by me (of course he was, I already knew Haskell). So he invited me to do research with him. First task: read "Propositions as Types". What a paper! I got hooked, and my work there can be summarized with these three projects:
While working on my research, the coolest company in the city (by my standards) started approaching me for an internship opportunity. I said no, busy with research. Then my research finished and I could either start a new year of it, or take the internship. I was too curious about the cool company, so I tried it! I started on a data science project, but didn't find it that much fun. After a few months, I changed into a development role and had a really good time with great teams around me.
I was still in the university, and close to having to write my thesis. Then, in perfect timing, over pizza and beer at the office, a colleague said "I saw something that made me think of you, it's called TLA+, you should check it out". I googled it and it was love at first sight. For someone who loved learning logic and was struggling with queues and message orderings every day, TLA+ felt like the ultimate thing developers should be using.
So I wrote my thesis about generating code out of TLA+ specs, which made me form a really good and somewhat unique mental model of TLA+ specs in my brain. I started a master's right after this, this time generating tests. I thought that if teams could get code and tests for free out of a TLA+ spec, they would have a stronger case for spending work hours writing specs.
In the middle of my master's though, something unimaginable (for me!) happened. The TLA+ people started noticing my work. Markus Kuppe said I should apply to speak at the TLA+ Conference, which I did. You can actually check the video for this (warning: I had a stronger accent back then). That was when Igor Konnov met me and told me I should apply to work at Informal Systems, a company that I was aware of and was actively trying to apply TLA+ and test generation in real engineering teams!
So I joined Informal Systems and they had this idea sort of in a drawer: what if we had a different surface syntax for TLA+ that addresses all the struggles we see the engineers having, and that would be too hard or impossible to fix in the TLA+ tools? Igor asked if I'd like to work on this project, and I couldn't believe it: formal methods and programming language theory as a full-time job? I felt like the luckiest person alive! And I still do.
And that's how Quint started. The team changed, I kept going, and more and more I learned to stand up for Quint. Upper management learned to trust me. I had dreams, and they started coming true. Then we started a company, spinning out of Informal Systems, and my co-founders said "Gabriela, we think you should be the CEO if you want to." I wanted to.
