Carlos Diogo Homepage

After the success of the development of a prototype for a global capacity optimization tool i was given the role of Project Manager for the implementation of the professionally developed application based on the prototype i developed.

The application was to be developed and rolled out on 5 location (4 factories across the globe and a central deployment on the headquarters) over a period of 12 months. I was responsible for compiling the final requirements , define time lines,  create the technical solution, test plan and discuss it with the vendor. Budget definition and  control were also part of my functions.

The budget for this project was around 500k/euros and the solutions and the project was delivered on time on on budget.  Although i was then working from the business side i designed most of the technical solution and even developed the reporting platform that would centralize the data from several locations.

On the business side i was also the responsible for the long waited alignment between sites on modeling strategies and conventions. On the beginning of the project one of the biggest problems was that although data from the sites was available , each site had its own format and way of model a certain manufacturing operation. For the central planners that was a nightmare. This project solved this issue and allowed greater visibility over the sites performance.

On the second year as project manager i was integrated on the Supply Chain projects group and took care of smaller projects. Within this projects i recall the Diebank Implementation , System Integration of a Silicon Foundry, Reporting Portal,  Engineering Rolling Forecast etc

The last three months on this position i was part of the team that would implement a location production planning and scheduling called Factory Planners. The team was based in Porto and i was responsible for the capacity modeling and data sourcing.

On January 2003 i took a new challenge. I travelled to Munich, Germany and started an internship supporting the Global Planning department on IT related issues.  Part of my role was supporting existing legacy tools on VB, Excel and Access that were used for both Production Planning and Capacity Planning.

However my main role was to develop a central capacity planning tool that would allow the central departments to create scenarios on product allocation and  investment over the several semi-competing sites in order to find the optimum setup for the Supply Chain model.

The basic struture of the application was a mathematical model of the supply chain , including the diferent locations and broken down to the baswic production steps. The development of this tool gave me great insight both on production modeling and simulation skills as well a great knowledge on short and long term planning methods.

The application was completed with success and it served as a prototype for a new global capacity optimization tool.

On January 2002 started my final project to complete my degree. The project was called Enterprise Information Portal and was done over an 6 months internship at Infineon Technologies SA, a semi-conductor backend located in teh are of Vila do Conde , Portugal.

The project consisted in replacing their old intranet platform by a dynamic platform that would allow news postings, document archiving, dynamic information over departments and groups, personal advertisements, weather and cultural information etc.

The project consisted of several phases from requirement gathering , specification , database modeling , implementation , test , release and documentation.

The technological platforms used were an Oracle database and IIS. The coding was done using ASP. My past experience with web-applications and PHP was easily translated to this project and my learning of VBscript was quite fast.

Besides maximizing my habilities and understanding of webapplication this project also introduced me to a new area , web crawling and content parsing.

In 2002 there were no such things as feeds. If you needed to include some information from another website you would need to fetch it and parse it to the format you needed. This was the case for the news, weather and cultural content of the intranet portal.

Several crawlers and parsers were designed in VB and were triggeres by a cron job on the server.  The crawlers would collect the webpage html code , and the parser would select and  retrieve the data out of the html page. The data was then stored on the database and presented in the portal.

The project was a success and was graded 17.5/20.  My internship was extended for another six months and i kept working on web-application targeting content management.

The last two years of my degree were focused on Telecommunications and Electronics.  Advanced electronics, Chip design , Digital filters , Networks , Telecommunications theory, Mobile Communications, Artificial intelligence were some of the main subjects.

Over these two years my productivity was more on hardware and low level programming, having created an intrusion alarm, parking garage controller  and a  speed radar.

On the last semester i probably had then the subject that brought me back to software creation , and introduced me my favorite platform , the internet.  The subject was focused on the principles of internet, introduced the HTML language and to the end introduced also the JAVA language. The subject had a small project component and for that i developed and web-statistics portal based on PHP.  I remember i was very proud with the result and i was awarded with the excellent grade.

This was the awakening of my software creator vein that would influence the choice of my final project.

In my University the first three years of any Engineering degree shared most of the subjects. Several aspects of mathematics and physics were covered intensively. Within the subjects i recall Algebra,  Statistics, Mathematical  Analysis, Numerical Methods , Classical Mechanics, Magnetism, Waves and many more.

Besides this , the first three years of engineering also covered the diverse fields of Electrotecnic engineering as Electronics, Microprocessors and Signal Theory of the Electronics and Telecommunications branch, Electric Machines and Energy systems of the  Energy branch and another couple of subjects of the Automation branch.

I was always a quick learner and due to that i was always able to skip the theoretical lessons and focus on the practical sessions of each subject , easily catching up. These quick learning and understanding also allowed me to just study for a couple of days before each exam and achieve good results.

This cocktail of physics and advanced mathematics allowed my analytical and problem solving skill to develop further. The contact with different subjects, providing ‘appetizers’ on several areas besides the pure electronics field together with my constant appeal to learn new things probably gave me the ability to be able to work on several areas and quickly become and expert in each one of them.

The first three years of Engineering were for the sure the hardest ones and in those years my software creator vein  was more or less sleeping

When i was 16 , ruffly one year before i entered my University, my parents bough me a PC. It was a Intel Pentium 166Mhz.  The search for the best computer had probably taken my time for the couple of months before.  The OS by then was the brand new Windows 95  and it represented a huge leap from the old windows 3.1. Floppy disks were still present and CDs were making its debut into the software world.

My main uses for the PC were games. Lots of time was spent playing Quake and other games. The internet was still nowhere to be seen but networking and file sharing  was starting with the BBS. My first modem was a ZOOM 28k and it allowed me to spend hours and hours downloading and uploading files to several bbs on my area. The networking part as fascinating and after some months i created my own BBS with content i had gathered. By then the preferred content were pictures, small movies and games.

New tecnologies always chalenged me and i remember to spend several weeks installing and configuring the BBS . That was the fun part for me. Making it happen.

My first real contact with a PC was with a Olivetti that my dad bought for the office. I was 13 years old. These days the PCs were booting with DOS and then could execute ‘WIN’ and you would have access to the first windows 3.1 operating system.

The computer had no sound device other then the beep and i remember dreaming about the SoundBlaster sound board.  Then the MS Word and Paint i did not use many on that PC.

One of my sisters was studing Chemical engineering and she had a project of building a simulator for Fluid Mechanics.  The simulator was build on QuickBasic and had a command line interface. The program would prompt for inputs and then preform some calculation and generate some charts.

The program was almost fully functional when i had the first contact with it but still had some problems. The existing coding allowed me to learn the basics of programming. By then was hard to get documentations or tutorials and the Internet was not available still in Portugal. However with what i learn i was able to help my sister and solve some of the problems.

The Quick Basic was the first compiler i used. For the first time i could create EXE and not anymore just BAS files that needed the Basic Interpreter. It felt like a big conquest for me

Early years of 1990-2000 i received my first computer. I was 10 years old and were the golden days of Amstrad Spectrum 128k.

The reasons for wanting so much the computer were that all my friends had and it was fun. Lots of games were available and those games kept me busy for lots and lots of afternoons. The Load “” was the first operation i learned.

Soon after i started playing around with the Basic interpreter  that came with and started coding small programs. My first one was probably a Christmas tree that blinked and played some tunes.  My first coding was on the direction on drawing and sounds ,maybe because the results were more immediate.

This computer kept me busy for several years till the first year of the PC.

During my childhood and before i started reading adventure romances the first books i remember reading were a book called Why? (Porque in Portuguese)  that  add answers to hundreds of questions about almost everything, an Encyclopedia and a 5Kilo book on animals.

I really enjoyed learning new things and science, geography and biology were my favorite subjects. I really liked to look into the maps, the border of the countries, the rivers, mountains. On the biology i was always looking for the biggest, the fastest, the deadliest animal. On science i was looking to understand how the things worked.

Together with reading my favorite distraction was building with LEGO. I spend hour and hours building cars, planes of all sizes an shapes. I had a big basket with thousands of blocks i collected over ten years.

Besides planes and cars my other constructions were traps for my sisters that i would build with legos, rubber and wires and i would put them on top or behind the doors.