Calgary BR Tech closed out September with its most personal session yet: “Síndrome do Impostor” (Impostor Syndrome), presented by Fernando Horta on the evening of September 21st at the Platform Innovation Centre. Around 25 to 30 people filled the room — enough that, as usual, the night doubled as one of our biggest networking sessions of the year — for a talk that traded slide decks full of theory for something rarer: one person’s honest inventory of every time he doubted himself, and what actually happened next.

A Talk Born From a Joke

The topic didn’t come from a research paper — it came from a conversation. Earlier this year, when every CBRT team member agreed to give a talk at some point, Anderson asked Fernando to pick a theme. Only half-joking, Fernando answered “impostor syndrome” — and immediately followed it with, “I’m not even good enough to talk about that.” The punchline became the premise. As he put it to open the night: if you search “impostor syndrome” in the dictionary, you won’t find his picture there either — he’s not good enough for that.

From the first minute, Fernando was clear about what the talk would not be: no psychology, no therapy-speak, no hugging your inner child. He’s not a psychologist, and he said so more than once — if you’re dealing with something heavier, go see one. What he offered instead was a mirror: his own story, told so that everyone in the room could find their own parallel in it.

The Voice That Lies

Fernando framed impostor syndrome through Among Us — the game where one player is secretly the saboteur while everyone else just tries to complete their tasks. In real life, he argued, everyone in the room really is doing their tasks. The only impostor is the voice in your own head insisting otherwise. When something goes right, that voice calls it luck. When something goes wrong, it calls it proof. He backed this up with “DataHorta research” — a bit built on a pun that really only lands in Portuguese, where fonte means “source,” “font,” and, it turns out, “power supply.” The fonte (source) of the data was “the voices in my head.” The fonte (font) on the slide was Comic Sans. And later in the talk, the fonte (power supply) doing the work was, for the record, a Corsair 850W. However you cite it, the number was roughly 70%: the share of people who carry that voice around, tech professionals especially so, thanks to a career built on constant change — new frameworks, new companies, and for many in the room, an entirely new country and culture to adapt to.

Nearly 30 Years of “I’m Not Good Enough”

The core of the talk was a walk through Fernando’s own timeline, story by story, each one following the same shape: the fear came first, the result came after.

• 2001, high school: fixing neighbours’ computers for a small fee and building GeoCities-era websites in HTML — already working in tech years before he’d admit he belonged in it.
• University entrance exams: rejected by USP’s law program, certain he “wasn’t cut out for it” — then accepted, first place, at another institution the very next term.
• A first job that vanished: his internship at a paper company ended when it was sold in a $720M deal, wiping out the career plan he’d built around it.
• Public service exams: rejected from two competitive government exams before passing one at UNIFESP — where he ended up building a 20-year career.
• A band, at 19: joining a group despite being terrified of being booed off stage, surrounded by musicians in his own family (his father once played for the governor of Minas Gerais at age 7). He played anyway — and kept playing.
• A leadership role at Hospital São Paulo: convinced he “couldn’t handle” coordinating a complex department. He ran it for years, and when the small IT team couldn’t keep up with what he needed, he taught himself to code — Google Sheets, Apps Script, eventually PHP — one Stack Overflow search at a time.
• The leap to Canada: selling his apartment and cashing in his savings to study Software Development at SAIT, certain he wouldn’t even survive the first semester. He graduated with a 4.0 GPA.
• An internship at Newton: landed, he’s convinced, because he cracked a joke about a broken link and a Hunger Games reference during two pizzas split among 220 students — not because he was qualified. When the internship ended and no interns were kept on, the “impostor voice” had, in his mind, been proven right again.
• The job hunt during the AI panic: with developers being laid off across the industry, Fernando built his own AI-assisted résumé tool — one that worked from his whole history instead of just a résumé excerpt — and used it to land his current role at a not-for-profit, fantastic non-tech company where he now finds himself doing the work he once doubted he could do: developer.

The Pattern

By the end of the timeline, the room could see it as clearly as Fernando did: vestibular, the band, UNIFESP, the hospital, SAIT, the job hunt — every single time, the fear showed up first, and the result showed up after. None of those “impossible” tasks were ever sabotaged by a real impostor, he said, “because he never existed.”

The Room Talks Back

In an experiment borrowed from Tech Tuesdays — another tech meetup that also runs out of The Platform — the talk paused for the audience to turn to a neighbour and share, in 30 seconds, the last time they delivered something great and immediately called it luck. Three volunteers then shared with the whole room. Hudson described how the feeling intensified after moving to Canada — the constant undertone of “what if I can’t keep up with the bills, what if I get let go next month” compounding with the pressure of AI reshaping the industry. Rauan talked about landing a freelance web project despite the voice telling him he wouldn’t pull it off, building a landing page, domain and professional email for a client from near scratch — and walking away proud, even while some part of him still wanted to file it under “luck.”

Disarming the Impostor

The Q&A pulled out the most practical part of the night. Answering Anderson’s question about learning guitar as a teenager and pushing through the early, rough-sounding years, Fernando traced it back to persistence, not talent — you start bad, someone will always tell you it’s bad, and you keep going anyway. Asked whether impostor syndrome shows up outside work, he shared a story about his birthday: he expected 10 people, nearly 30 showed up, and his first instinct was to credit luck rather than the friendships he’d actually built. On staying motivated after rejection, he described treating it like grief — anger, denial, sadness, and eventually acceptance — followed by an honest audit: was it a missing skill, or genuinely bad luck? Fix what’s fixable, and keep going.

He left the room with a short toolkit for the voice itself:

• Facts over feelings — keep a file of praise, approved work, and wins to reread on the hard days.
• Nobody knows everything — googling something, or asking ChatGPT, doesn’t make you incompetent.
• Say it out loud — talking to peers or mentors reveals just how many people feel the exact same way.
• Reframe it — swap “I got lucky” for “I prepared, and I took the opportunity.”
• Compare yourself to who you were — not to the imagined, perfect version of everyone else.

His closing line summed up the whole night: “You’re not here by accident. You’re here because you did the work.”

How Our Community Benefits

Nights like this are exactly why Calgary BR Tech exists. Thank you to Platform Calgary for the space, to NeoOmni for sponsoring as our technology partner, and to Social Grid as our media sponsor. Events built around real, unpolished stories — not just technical know-how — give Brazilian professionals in Calgary a space to recognize themselves in each other, trade the “impostor voice” for a shared laugh, and leave with a little more proof that they belong exactly where they are.

Our next session lands on October 19th, back at Platform, with Eduarda Lyra talking about career transitions — a topic just as relevant to anyone who’s ever wondered if they’re on the right path. Follow Calgary BR Tech at cbrt.ca, on Instagram @cbrt, LinkedIn, and YouTube to stay in the loop. This presentation was recorded, watch it here - in Brazilian Portuguese though. If you want, a copy of the PowerPoint was translated to English and can be found here.