5–10 Minutes in Python. Half a Second in C++.

Alan de Freitas grew up in the countryside of Minas Gerais, Brazil, fixing neighbors’ computers and fascinated by two things: technology and music.

His uncle played guitar, and Alan remembers watching how music made everyone around him happy. When it came time for college, his parents told him to follow his heart — as long as it wasn’t music.

So he found another way to bring those worlds together.

Alan pursued research at the intersection of music and optimization, eventually running an experiment that would change the direction of his career. He took the same algorithm that was running in Python and rewrote it in C++.

The result?

Tasks that had been taking five to ten minutes were suddenly completing in about half a second.

That breakthrough helped lead to Matplot++, an open-source plotting library for C++, and marked the beginning of Alan’s deeper involvement in the C++ ecosystem.

For years, he lived what he calls a “double life” — professor by day, open-source developer by night.

Then the C++ Alliance community introduced him to developers, projects, and opportunities he says he never would have found working alone.

“My life would be very different without the C++ Alliance.”