American Immigrant in Portugal. Building Cool Stuff. Having Fun.

I'm Justin. A Portuguese-American, Bay Area native who moved to Lisbon, Portugal in 2022 with my wife and dog. We live here full-time. I'm currently at a B1 level in Portuguese—capable enough to handle daily life, but still working hard to catch the nuance in rapid-fire conversation.

For eight years, I ran a marketing consultancy. Working inside dozens of businesses revealed a recurring pattern: companies hired me to fix a symptom (like traffic) while their real problem was structural: disconnected tools, manual workflows, and data they couldn't trust.

I realized the biggest leverage had shifted. The value wasn't in specialized services anymore. It was in architecting and implementing the engines that run underneath.

I closed my agency to focus on a new objective: building getviajo.com as a live production environment for these systems. This website documents the engineering and strategy behind that build.

Why Portugal?

Portugal has become a hotspot for Americans recently, but my connection goes back much further.

My first time here was back in 2009. Over the years, I just kept returning. I made friends, learned the neighborhoods, and probably spent a cumulative year here off-and-on. Moving here became the long-term goal.

At 24, I decided to pursue Portuguese citizenship through my ancestry. My grandparents still had the original immigration documents we needed, tucked away in their attic. The citizenship process was long, expensive, and full of bureaucratic hurdles, but with their help, we made it happen. I'll never forget the day my red EU passport arrived in the mail; it felt like the door to a whole new life had just opened.

Later, when COVID changed how many of us think about work and location, my wife and I decided it was time. We've been here since August 2022, and honestly? People sometimes complain about it here, but I couldn't be happier.

The Big Picture

My professional focus is simple. I am pivoting away from consulting to join a product team full-time. I want to apply this architectural approach of designing the system and executing the growth strategy simultaneously to solve problems at scale. I'm looking for environments that value robust infrastructure over quick hacks.

I share what I'm building because I believe in working in public. The challenges, the technical decisions, the late-night debugging sessions, it's all part of the process. I figure someone out there might find the journey useful.

Want to see some of the systems I've built? Check out my projects page. For a snapshot of my current focus, visit my now page.

Questions? Want to connect?

Thanks again for stopping by.