From Hip-Hop to Code

Hello, everyone. Now I'm nervous.

Okay, so today I'm going to talk about my journey from being an hip-hop artist, a rapper in Portugal, to becoming a design engineer or a coder or a designer. Even today, I don't know what I am. This is me drinking, you know.

And my name is Elisabeth Oliveira. I'm Portuguese. I'm a design engineer at Zeta, a startup, and I've been doing code for and design for, I don't know, more than 12, 15 years. I don't know. I think I've been doing for so long that at some point of my life I didn't even know that I was doing, you know.

And I'm going to start my story by explaining where I was living when all this journey of hip-hop and coding started. So I was living at Madorna. Madorna is in Pared, Pared is in Cascais, Cascais is in Lisbon, Portugal. So Madorna is this very small place, urban area in Cascais, and it's a place where there was at the time a lot of people, our parents were coming from Africa, so there are a lot of ghetto places there. And of course, because of that, hip-hop was the main thing.

So we, my brother, that's the one in the photo, called Macaco Simão, it was his artistic name, Monkey Simon, and that girl, Telma Tivon, she was the first rapper I ever seen perform, a girl doing hip-hop. And my brother, he was the one organizing this event. So it was my first ever hip-hop show. It was in my school. The Cascais Council put their stage, some speakers, and we did this event that changed my life forever. Because after that, I started questioning, is there more girls doing hip-hop? Can I also start doing hip-hop? So at that point, I decided I want to be a rapper, but I'd only seen before that girl, Telma, performing. So after that, I was, okay, I should create my own group, because I can't do that alone.

So I started using MIRC. Does anyone here know what is MIRC? Yes. So it was the slack from the old people, you know? So I started going to these MIRC channels from Portuguese hip-hop, trying to recruit girls to form a group, and I found this girl from Alentejo called Blai, and nowadays, Blai is a very famous artist in Portugal. I recruited my sister because I couldn't find more people. My sister, she's there in the photo. My niece, she's older than me. This is a very common African thing. My family comes from Africa, so it's very normal that your mother gets pregnant at 16, then when she's 30-something, she has other kids, and then her daughter, my sister, was pregnant too, so I'm older than my niece.

That's the thing. So I finally had my first show. I recruited these girls, and we started performing. And when we did our first show, everyone was impressed because they said, oh, you're very advanced. But the reason why we are very advanced is because we had internet access. I had a computer at home, and because of that, I could download instrumentals, like famous people's instrumentals, like a Tupac instrumental, TLC, and the other people couldn't. They were still using cassettes and CDs, and we are very advanced.

So after that, I kept questioning, is there more girls in Portugal doing hip-hop, because I only knew Thelma and my group. So I created a community in 2005 called Hip-Hop Ladies, and it was a Joomla website. It was the first time I was hacked ever. So I did the website. The website was hacked. I cried. Oh, my gosh, my brother helped me. Then I bought a hosting service. It was fake. I lost my 40 euros. I cried a lot, and my brother then taught me, oh, you can't just buy any hosting service you find. And then I moved to WordPress, so the community became like a WordPress.

Then I wanted to improve it. I started learning how to create WordPress teams, and that's it, and then I started also organizing events in clubs in Portugal. Our first event was okay, and then we were invited to go to Porto also to perform, and I was negotiating everything. So the first show in Porto, that is in the north of Portugal, we went there, we performed, and then at the end, the other girls were asking me, hey, where are we going to sleep? So I forgot to negotiate that. So, okay, now we have to wait until 5.30 a.m. to go back to Lisbon. So I learned a lot, and after that, the community had a lot of backlash because people started saying, oh, this hip-hop ladies community is splitting the hip-hop. We should just be one big community instead of having hip-hop for ladies and for men, and that was okay. I'm investing so much time.

Let me invest that time in myself. So I created my personal website, this time with HTML and JQuery with a lot of animations, and because of that, Universal Music saw my website, started seeing things that I was putting on MySpace, and I got my first deal with Universal Music Portugal.

So from 2005 until 2008, I was performing. I was in television shows. I was in news, magazine, all this makeup, you know, that nowadays I feel embarrassed. I have to be honest, and there were some highlights from this time. My music was on top of MTVs. I was in the Portuguese radio stations. Two of my songs was in the PlayStation Singstar. I was in this Portuguese TV series called Murang Sua Suca. It was very famous, and that was sponsored by Nike. I even had one photo with Cristiano Ronaldo for Nike and did other things.

So there was a lot of positive things from being an artist, first like travel. At the time, as you've seen, I was living in Moderna. I was poor, so it was my first time going to really nice hotels, traveling around Portugal, meeting really cool people, a lot of friendships and experience. I was doing what I love, and the social aspect was also cool. Is anyone here from Brazil? No? Okay. It's the first time I do a talk and there's no one from Brazil. Yeah, so some of these photos are in Brazil. But also there was a negative side of being an artist.

The first one was the exploitation. I was very young when I signed a deal with Universal, and I signed a 360 deal, so it means everything that I was doing, they got a cut. Some of the shows, I was the one finding myself, but then they had their cut. Everything, like from shows to CDs, all the streaming, they were having their part. I had a lot of lack of time. All of my life was during the night, all the shows during the night. I was almost not living during the day, waking up like 2 p.m., so it was awful. The hip hop in Portugal at the time was very aggressive. It was a very aggressive environment, a lot of competition, discrimination. I was one of the first artists in Portugal to have a video with 1 million views on YouTube, and with that, there was a lot of cyberbullying. A lot of people were going there saying, you're too skinny, you don't have boobs, you're ugly, and these type of things were really affecting me. I was like, I don't like to be an artist anymore.

I was not prepared. I started having a lot of mental health issues, being depressed. I was always very skinny, but I ended up even being much more skinnier. A lot of people that knew me at the time were like, hey, what happened to you? I was also drinking a lot because you just go out every day and after the show. So I said, I'm done with this. I just need to find another job. And I didn't know what to do.

I actually studied tourism at the university, and I projected all my life to the events industry. And some people started saying, hey, you're really good at coding. But I didn't notice that at the time. But then people started saying, yeah, you coded that hip hop ladies website, you coded your website, you coded your friend's website. And I said, yeah, maybe I could do this for a living. So I took like a web developer, PHP, MySQL course, and then I became a WordPress developer. I got my first job. I thought it was, I was really lucky. The thing was, I was coming from the music industry. So the first offer they did, I will say I'm already rich. So it was like 800 euros a month. So yeah, but coming from the music, it was, oh my gosh, finally I'm going to have a monthly income.

But I was still really motivated with hip hop. But every time I was doing hip hop things, I was losing my jobs. For example, I found a really good job in Lisbon for a startup in Berlin. And they were paying a very good salary comparing with this 800 euros job I had before. But I had this offer to go to Brazil to perform and stay there for one month. So I said, hey, I go there and I have to perform. And they said, yeah, but we have a lot of work. And now you're going to travel. Yeah, I can work from there. Hey, okay, okay. So when I arrived there, the hotel didn't have wifi.

So I replied, I talked with them, I don't have wifi here. And so I was in Salvador de Bahia. And then when I went to Rio, I had wifi. And then they said, you know what, let's hand the contract, it's not working. So I lost my best job at the time. It was like 1600 euros a month. So it was much better. And then I was okay. I have to really stop doing music. I have just to focus on coding. And I wrote this article, it's okay to quit. And I really decided that and I started trying new things.

And I moved to Dublin, I got a job offer. And my life just started going well, like finally, I'm making money, I'm traveling. I even paid for my friend's tickets to visit me in Dublin, you know, I was living my poor person life, becoming rich, you know. But then that's it, I left hip hop. But hip hop at the end never left me because hip hop is like a culture, it's your way of living. And I started having these hip hop philosophies, like show off. So when I arrived at Dublin, I noticed that compared to Lisbon, London, or Berlin, it's not a very creative tech city, even though it sells itself as one. So I arrived there, a hip hop person with my baggy jeans, like yo, and everyone was dressed properly. All my jobs were in the banking industry. I realized that I needed to start doing creative things.

So I had this project called Cassette Tape that I submitted to experiment with Google. At the time, there were experiments with the Web Audio API, and only Chrome supported recording in the browser. So I submitted it and was invited to Google IO in Dublin, as well as the React JS meetup. The project allowed recording with an audio blob appearing, just a basic hip hop loop.

And then they I was invited for the Google IO in Dublin, and then for doing meetups, the React JS meetup. And then I was okay, this was like the project. Just you could record and then there was a audio blob appearing. And that's just very basically just a hip hop loop.

And then I also had this philosophy, like do it yourself. And I was working for a startup. And because I'm also very lazy designer, like I try to automate things. So at the time, I tried to automate how to do illustrations, like can I find a way that it makes it easier for developers? So instead of every time a developer needs an illustration, instead of going to at the time going to sketch, exporting, I was like, maybe I can create a component that is an illustration, they just pass some props, and that's it. So I created this project.

I put it on GitHub. One day the project was trending. I didn't know why. I tried to find what was the cause, and I found that Guillermo, that nowadays is from Versailles, the CEO, retweeted it. And after that, the project became famous. And then I won that React Amsterdam award that actually was Sarah picking up the award. I couldn't go there. Yes. And then I went to React Conf Las Vegas. It was my first conference ever. And I went there to talk about this project. So that's basically the project. You can pick the colors. You can also pick some moods for the illustrations. And that's it. It's very basic.

And then other thing that is part also from my philosophy of the hip hop is start before you're ready. And the start before you're ready is most of the time I have an idea of a project, and I don't know how to start. So it's always like that. But I started, I designed it. And this is an example that I'm going to show how to make it happen.

So, for example, this cassette, I created this song called Fork This, and I just wanted this audio player. So to create this, I decided to use SVGs, because the SVG is almost like HTML. So you can export that design, and then you can interact with JavaScript or React. And then I start thinking in components, like, how can I split, instead of having a very long file with SVG, how can I split this in components? And then I start, like, okay, this is the controls component, where I'm going to have the state and logic. And then that's basically one part of the SVG that I put inside that cassette tape controls component. And then the sticker components, basically, to tell what is the current track, same thing. Then this part rotates, is that rotate things, and then I'm using framer motion. So, basically, I have this Boolean saying, is it track playing or not? If it's playing, it's a very basic animation, just rotating. And then this component is not doing anything. And then I have this one, that it took me some time to think how can I animate this. I wanted it to bounce with the song. And that was okay. At the time, I didn't have Shed GPT. So I had to research. And then I found that the Web Audio API had, like, this method to get the frequency of the song, and then you can get the intensity of the frequency, and that's what I used to animate the radio. And then this is all the parts of the SVG together. And now I'm going to do a demo.

And before I start the demo, I want you to help me, because I'm going to sing my song, Fork This. And the chorus is very easy. I'm just going to say, I'm coding like a criminal, designing like a miracle. They say I'm invisible, and you say, fork this, I'm original. Okay? So let's try. I'm coding like a criminal, designing like a miracle. They say I'm invisible. Fork this, I'm original. Yeah. Okay, let's. Oh, and this project, you can find on my GitHub. So you have different versions. The first one is the song with my voice, and then you have the karaoke version.

That is the song with some of my voice in the back, and then just instrumental. So let's do the karaoke version and see how it goes. I've been designing with ten pots, open source, connecting every dot, server side and rendering next. You can call me exporter, edge. No more life cycles, react. You can call me lightweight, react. I'm way too complicated. TypeScript, but I'm still in this class. Type this, learning from mistakes. Microsoft, more than a million skills. Lara Croft, trying to not look back. Angular, I don't have an expression. Regular, animating SVGs, original. Let me kill it one time. Terminal, watching, giving a talk. Netflix, I'm gonna keep it short. ES6, now you. I'm coding like a criminal, designing like a miracle. They say I'm invisible. Now you, let's go. Fork this, I'm original. I'm coding like a criminal, designing like a miracle. They say I'm invisible. Now you, fork this, I'm original. Mewki. Yeah. Open source queen, old school girl, coding with Beam. GitHub star, GitHub queen, feeling it, feeling it, changing the scene. Yeah. Open source queen, old school girl, coding with Beam.

GitHub star, GitHub queen, feeling it, feeling it, changing the scene. I'm an old school girl, high five. Sonic and Tails, Mega Drive, coding and rhymes, Spotify. You devs can't see me, Wi-Fi. No competition, goodbye. And you can reach me, all right. Another level, that's right. Call me eleven, sci-fi. I'm coding like a criminal, designing like a miracle. They say I'm invisible. Fork this, I'm original. I'm coding like a miracle. They say I'm invisible. Let's go. Fork this, I'm original.

I'm coding like a criminal, designing like a miracle. They say I'm invisible. Fork this, I'm original. I'm coding like a criminal, designing like a miracle. They say I'm invisible. Fork this, I'm original. Yeah. Okay. And I'm reaching the end of the talk. And I just want to say that after being just a design engineer for a long time, finally, last year, I got the reconciliation with HipHop, because I reached that point of my life of, okay, now I have a stable job. You know, and after the pandemic, some people got like this, start becoming nostalgic and inviting me for throwback events. And you know that you're getting old when you start going to this type of throwback events. But I finally was invited and I started like conciliating music and doing shows again. And that's it. And these are some of the takeaways that I want you to take.

So, combine your passions with code. Most of the times, the projects that, you know, that makes you achieve things are things that you're really passionate about. Like Sarah, for example, she does really likes retro games. And almost every time she's doing like these projects with retro games. And I think that's part of us being successful is really just not doing code for money, but also to use it for your passions or to help people.

Also, another thing is like your code is okay. I don't consider myself like a real developer. I consider myself more like a designer. And for a long time, I was like, oh, I'm not going to put this project out because people are going to see my code. But you know, but at some point it's like, whatever. At least you're doing it. Open source can open many doors.

Other thing is like it's never too late. I always all of my life having this feeling, oh, I'm old for this, old for that. But you're not. You can predict the future. Show off your projects. Someone is going to like, even if you think no one, and we always think that. Do it also. Do it yourself. And even if you don't know where to start, just start it. You're going now, pretty simple nowadays with chat GPT. Come on. You just need to, hey, how can I start this? I use it a lot. I have all these conversations with him. Like, yeah, therapy.

And that's it. So thank you. Thank you so much. I love how you've talked about some of the kind of things from from the music world and how you've translated some of those lessons over to the tech world.

And this question from Leo talks about that as well. Sort of being a black woman in hip hop. How do you compare them to the struggles of being in another, let's be honest, male-dominated industry? I'd like to think we try to be inclusive, but we've still got a lot of work to do. So anything that has kind of carried over and helped you while you were here?

Yeah. So I think to at least at the time, the hip hop industry was way more worse than the tech industry. So when I start doing or working in tech, I was, oh, this is amazing because I was really coming from this very male background. And then there was a lot of initiatives and there still is in the tech industry, like women in tech. So a lot of things that in the music industry we don't have yet. We're trying, for example, in Portugal, there was this initiative from some festivals that there's a percentage of the performance at the festival, they need to be women. But some festivals, they don't do that, like the radios also don't do that. And at least some tech companies really follow these. But I think it's part of the world and the world is still very, very, led by men. And I think it's a struggle in every industry.

No, for sure. And it's great that we have made a lot of progress, still much progress to work. So every single one of us in this room, we can get closer to that future where we look at it. And it's actually history that we're talking about, not today.

Well, that was awesome. I do have a question for myself. Now, I love karaoke. I would like to ask your permission to be able to take this song to some karaoke in the future. Yes, please. Yes, please. And where can we find music if we want to listen to your songs? Yeah, so this song, I decided to promote it on GitHub. I'm going to create a repo, and I did a video myself and the video I'm using, like the memoji from iOS. So I was like, transforming myself in this cartoon character. And then I put it so you can find on YouTube, and you can find on GitHub. Awesome.

That's amazing, folks. And I'm really sorry, because this question just came in. We actually have run out of time for questions, because we are going to head over for the closing. So, Leo, you will get the mug wherever you are, feel free to come and grab the mug. But can we give one more round of applause to Elizabeth?