PEOPLE
Headquartered in downtown Porto in Portugal, Hive Solutions is a company that wants to ride the cutting edge of innovation without taking a toll on the life of its workers. We're creating a culture where excellence is valued and pursued, while encouraging creativity and work-life balance.
Left his work at Microsoft with the vision of founding a tech startup in Portugal, which would later be called Hive Solutions. He loves to code at the lowest level with ones and zeros, or design architectures at the highest level, depending on how the planets are aligned that particular day.
He is currently in rehab from his Google Reader addiction and obsession with knowing every programming language, framework, methodology and any other piece of conceptual or technology skill or knowledge, and can now finally get time to play XBox with his twin brother.
As the CEO he also takes care of the bureaucratic stuff like financial, payroll and accounting coordination.
Little after he could read and write, he was tampering with the memory addresses on his Commodore Amiga to get infinite energy and cheat his way through computer games, when he should have been outside playing football like normal kids.
Throughout life he has been obsessed with random and sometimes purposeless skills and subjects like martial arts, juggling, foreign languages, neural networks, psychology, neuro linguistic programming, speed reading, monty python, stand-up comedy, latin dances, philosophy or just trying to memorize a deck of playing cards in under three minutes for no reason whatsoever.
He left his work at Microsoft in Denmark to co-found Hive, and while in the office, when not found programming with his headphones blasting loud music, he can be found juggling in the corridors, refining his backup strategy for getting money to return home in case he is mugged in his next random backpacking trip.
Luís was sick and tired of society's obsession with hair, shampoos, conditioners, hair cuts, saying that stuff is for sissies, and like a real man, he shaved his hair all the way down.
He has become our own personal programmer zen monk, since he left his work at a Portuguese subsidiary of an Indian Outsourcing giant, where he was working for United Kingdom's largest retailer and joined Hive.
He's been into too many martial arts to be good at any of them, and is currently a Tango dancer and closet CrossFit fan that can use his rudimentary knowledge of Mandarin Chinese to leave Chinese Restaurant waiters confused.
We call him Chico, and he is the one who makes up for our overall lack of aesthetics, as well as for our almost supernatural ability to draw everything as crappy stick figures.
He is a Photoshop ninja and it has been said that he can paint the Mona Lisa in it by only using keyboard shortcuts, blindfolded, while doing a handstand with two fingers. This myth is still pending confirmation, as we have not needed such a painting in the work we have done until now, but we'll tweet something about it when we find out.
Marco has got some mean user interface design chops. He's known for keeping his work looking pretty fresh and pushing the envelope on web application design.
He comes from Portugal's very own Heartland, Viseu, but has lived in Porto since 2005. He came across software development while studying computer science in college, but soon found out that web design was to be his gift to the world. And so he delivers amazing websites, over and over again.
When not around, Marco spends time visiting his inlaws in Istambul, but keeps his twitter up-to-date and his laptop close by.