From Psychologist to Engineer: Sofia Cardita’s Path to Cloudflare

Hi, my name is Sofia Cardita. I'm based off Lisbon. I've been in Cloudflare for about four to five years and I'm a systems engineer at Cloudflare, mostly focused on backends. Nowadays, a lot on browser rendering, Chrome, DevTools, and that kind of thing. What are the products and things you work on usually? Right now, it's mostly browser rendering. In the past, I was also involved in Cloudflare Radar. It was a great fun project. And URL Scanner, which is also a part of Radar and Security Center. My past is a bit off the beaten path. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. What happened was as part of a rehabilitation program, an association of mental health patients had a training in IT and the regular IT trainers were having difficulty managing. And so I was invited since my thesis was also on how the Internet impacted communication. Anyway, I was invited to that since my background was in psychology. And I ended up really liking teaching. It was basic stuff, Excel, front page, Macromedia, Flash, etc. I ended up really liking it. And then as one of my best friends, she was a web designer. She was doing a site for a psychology bookshop and her main developer basically couldn't continue. So I thought, okay, let me try and help since I'm getting to like this IT stuff. And so I studied a bit, I tried to, and then I did it and that was the start of it. This was almost all self-learning. So I didn't take any courses at the time. I simply started, she started a company in the web development space and she invited me in and that's basically I learned on the job. Of course, I also did some courses, etc. But that was almost after I had actually started doing my job. So it was a lot of self-learning, a lot of studying, a lot of reading, doing stuff, building stuff from scratch that I could actually understand it. That is how you learn. Even nowadays with all the AI, you learn best by actually building stuff. And that's what I did. I built a lot of stuff from regular websites to newspapers. I did a major economics newspaper website in Portugal. So yeah, I learned on the job. What is the thing about engineering that you most enjoy and like? I like the ownership in the sense that when it fails, there's a way to fix it. You can, not easily sometimes, but you can find the issue and you can fix it. When it compares to my previous job, a long time ago, with people, there is no such pass to clarity. So this was something, the feedback, not immediate, but most often pretty quick feedback that working with computers gives you. It's something I truly enjoy. And then building things from scratch, thinking about how the information flows from one component to the other, which is sort of like building a building, is something that I really enjoy. Regarding your projects at Cloudflare, which ones do you enjoy the most? I think Radar is still one of the ones I really like because it has a public service side to it. It's about giving back. It's about Cloudflare giving back what we see on the Internet. Redoing the API at the time was something that I really enjoyed. And it's still a product I feel proud of and have been enjoying it grow after I left. Lessons learned. It's about going, trying to really understand the systems we've built. Build a lot of ways where you can see what's actually happening. You think it works one way, but sometimes it works another way. And having a way to peek inside the system is something that you really should do. And we don't always do that, but we're getting better and better. So TLDR observability, that's what I'm talking about. And just communicate. This is teamwork. So just learn how to communicate kinds to others and regular stuff, regular human stuff. What's a piece of advice or tip you can give to others just starting out in this industry? Well, I think this industry is changing a lot right now with the advent of AI, even at Cloudflare, I think. The way I spend my time in these last three months has changed a lot. We're using a lot of AI. That shouldn't discourage you from... Well, in a way, it actually gives you more opportunities to learn how things actually work because you have your own self-tutor that you can ask. So it's really easy to learn nowadays. But if you don't learn, then you're sort of missing out. So even with AI, you should really go deep because that's how, when AI is stuck, you're the one who's going to unblock it. So even though it's easier to build things without fully understanding them, I think nowadays that is true. It is reality. You should also see it as an opportunity that you have this personal tutor to actually learn things deeper. So that when things happen, you actually grow how the entire system works. Best way I've seen is AI so far. My regular workflow nowadays is if I'm debugging stuff, maybe one of the first things I'll do is ask it to see if it finds the issue while I'm also looking at the issue. So it's like both of us are doing the same thing at the same time. So that's one thing. Another is just reviews. Reviews are very, very good nowadays. And so I sometimes even push an incomplete what I think needs to be reviewed. I haven't thoroughly reviewed because I want the early feedback that the AI reviewer gives me. So I really enjoy that. Sometimes it says things I already know that were marked as to-do items and sometimes it says things that I hadn't thought of and it's really interesting. It doesn't see everything, of course, but it's still a very useful partner. Your go -to productivity hack? One of them is very simple. It's actually just rest. Make sure you are not 100% of the time focused on work because unlike what the productivity hackers in social media will do, will tell you that is not how you actually do your best work. You do your best work by being rested, by doing exercise and by just having fun. So most, I know this is sort of common sense, but it's true and not everyone does it or at least we easily forget. It's trying to keep the fun in it. Keep the fun in it. So that's one major productivity hack. Another, of course, just we can talk about AI. AI helps. Then just keep organized. Know what you're going to do at the beginning of the day.