“Programming is like craft. You need knowledge to write a program that works properly, but at the same time creativity and experience are very important to develop a solution for a new problem”
Vanessa's biography
Vanessa Sabino started her career in IT in 2000 after finishing her studies in Business Administration. Working as a System Analyst at Accenture, she had the opportunity to learn different technologies and apply them to a wide range of organizations, including government, telecommunication, manufacturing, and retail.
After three years in IT consulting, she decided to continue her studies by pursuing a new degree, this time in Applied and Computational Mathematics, followed by a Masters in Computer Science, both at Universidade de São Paulo, in Brazil.
Back to business, she started working as a Java developer at internet companies. First Universo Online, Brazil’s largest online service provider, where she helped develop and maintain the billing system, and after that she joined BuscaPé, the foremost ecommerce company in Latin America, where she worked in their comparison shopping site.
In 2010, she started getting involved in Digital Analytics, and when a recruiter from Rocket Internet invited her to lead that area in a new ecommerce startup to be launched in Brazil, she jumped at the opportunity. In less than two years, Dafiti became the leading fashion ecommerce in Brazil and expanded to other countries. As a result of her work, she was the winner of the Ecommerce Brazil Award 2012 in the metrics category.
In late 2012 she moved to Canada and joined Shopify as a Business and Marketing Analyst, where she has the opportunity to help shape the commerce in Canada and around the world.
To start with, programming is like a craft. You need hard knowledge to write a program that works properly, but at the same time creativity and experience are very important to develop a solution for a new problem. There isn’t only one right way to write a computer program, but there is some elegance attached to a well structured code that is easy to understand and maintain. There is also the satisfaction that when your task is done, in general it’s possible to verify if the results are right or wrong and you can iterate until you get it right. For data analysis in particular, it’s great how the results of your work can have a great impact in the bottom line. At Shopify, everyone loves data and they are always seeking a better understanding of it, so the data analysis team gets involved in many areas of the organization.
