Felipe Guedes.
Software Engineer and Systems Architect. System Design specialist: shapes systems that hold up in the real world. Builds technology to accelerate science. Pedro's son. Author of this memorial.
“Some stories do not go on for the time they had. They go on for what they came to mean.”
On the making of this memorial
The father he met as a teenager.
Felipe met Pedro at fifteen. Until then, by his own account, his father did not know he existed. They came together after a search made with the help of Marilu, one of the people who took part in his upbringing.
One visit to the clinic remains vivid. For about two hours, father and son talked. Felipe remembers Pedro speaking about kindness and about how to lead a life. He also remembers a simple question: what did he want to be when he grew up?
He answered that he wanted to be a lawyer. In that answer was the wish to impress his father and to present a future that seemed important. Medicine, at that moment, seemed far from the possibilities he could see.
From the goodbye remained a hug, the taxi his father called and a piece of Trident gum. Small details, kept because that relationship hardly had time to become everyday.
Not long after, Pedro died. Felipe learned of his death when there was no longer any chance of a farewell. The meeting had been brief; its importance was not.
Growing up also meant learning to recognise who reached out.
As a child, Felipe lived in the care of different people. Dilza and Carlos took him into a family that already had eight children and few resources. Marilu was present at important stages. Etelvina, Seu Mário and others were also part of that network of care.
That story holds absences, changes and responsibilities that came early. Telling it does not mean turning hardship into spectacle. It means recognising that no one builds themselves alone and that every act of welcome plays a part in what a person can become.
From the print shop and electronics to technology.
Around the age of twelve, Felipe began learning graphic production at Arte Final, with Samuel. He worked with CorelDRAW and FlexiSIGN, started creating pieces and followed the cutting and application of vinyl. There he saw how a need described by a client could take shape and identity.
Later, at Gradualtec, he learned electronics repair with Val. He watched, asked and practised. That way of learning ran through visual communication, electronics, marketing, user experience and software development. Being self-taught, for him, never meant learning without people.
Build, lose and start again.
Still a teenager, Felipe began paying for his own housing. He worked in auto parts, events, painting and construction. He studied three years of Biomedicine at FMU; health came close to his story again, but the need to support himself made the final unpaid internship impossible. He did not finish the degree.
In 2018 he moved to Toledo, in Paraná. New connections opened the way to work in marketing and technology and, later, to entrepreneurship. It was then that he met Natália, now his wife.
With the 2020 pandemic, contracts were lost one after another. Leaving the building where he worked, Felipe unlocked his bicycle, rode a few metres and turned back to lock it up again. He preferred to walk home. He needed time to cry and to find a way to talk to Natália, who was pregnant. He found no reproach. He found someone willing to cross the new beginning by his side, and a mother-in-law, Iara, who took the family in.
The rebuilding came in ordinary days: bills reorganised, work resumed, decisions taken without certainty they would work out. Felipe recognises in that period the strength of family, of the people who stayed, and of the Christian faith that came to hold an important place in his life.
A contribution in his own language.
Today Felipe is a Software Engineer and Systems Architect, a System Design specialist. What he most enjoys is exactly that: deciding how a system is organised, scales and fails safely before the first line is written. At fgxdev.com he brings together software architecture, System Design, digital products and user experience: understanding people, organising complex problems and turning ideas into systems that work.
The question Pedro asked at the clinic never got a final answer. Felipe did not become a lawyer, as he told his father. Nor did he become a doctor. He found a third answer in technology: building tools able to reach where he alone could not.
From that answer came the motivation for ELUCENIA, an artificial-intelligence project for scientific discovery that begins in the cardiovascular field. The conviction is simple: if the father devoted his life to caring for people through Medicine, the son can use software, data and AI to extend what researchers and doctors can do. Every hypothesis will need evidence; every advance, scientific validation; every decision, human responsibility.
The son who still talks to his father.
Felipe had only a few hours with Pedro. What remained were documents, photographs, stories told by others and the memory of that conversation. Building this memorial was a way of bringing those parts together without pretending they replace the lost time.
In organising Pedro's articles, stories and life passages, Felipe came to know him by the way he treated people: the care given to those who could not pay, the respect before another's pain, the responsibility to the profession. Perhaps that is the adult answer to the question asked at the clinic. Felipe did not choose his father's profession. He chose to carry forward the principle he found in him: knowledge only finds its meaning when it improves someone's life.