From RPG Maker to Full-Stack: How Ed Rocha Built a Career on Curiosity and Code

Before Ed Rocha wrote a single line of production code, he was already thinking like a developer — designing custom battle systems and menus inside RPG Maker 2000, the game-creation tool he used as a kid to build his own RPGs without writing a single line of code.

That early tinkering did something lasting. Rocha, a full-stack web developer who has been with X-Team for just under a year, traces an almost unbroken line from those afternoons tinkering with RPG Maker to the work he does today — building across the stack, automating things that probably don't need automating, and collecting signed Magic: The Gathering cards from friends on multiple continents.

In this story, Rocha shares how a childhood love of retro gaming became a software career, how he learned to stay productive across time zones and unfamiliar cities, and why he believes that showing up as your best self for the people around you matters more than any single line of code.

The Long Road From RPG Maker to the Real Web

Rocha grew up a self-described nerd — drawn to strategy games, card games and anything that rewarded careful thinking. RPG Maker was a natural fit. "Creating my own RPGs and playing with software really developed my programmer muscles," he says, "since basically all of the concepts in RPG Maker transferred very well when I started coding for real."

When it came time to choose a university major, he weighed Psychology and Economics before landing on Computer Science. In his first semester he picked up C and Pascal, then gravitated toward Python and Ruby. His earliest real programs were text-based games — combat systems included — which, in retrospect, read as a direct continuation of the RPG Maker years.

That thread led to his first professional role at Supernova Games in Brazil, where he did Unity and C# programming. One project stood out: building a gamified employee experience for a branch of the largest medical work cooperative in Brazil, complete with quizzes and a visual novel feel. Rocha handled the back end in JavaScript, the project landed well — the majority of employees played and competed for top scores — and it introduced him to remote work for the first time.

His next position was his first fully remote role, and it pushed him across a wider technology surface quickly. "I had to quickly learn and implement many features across a wide array of technologies," he says. "That's when I started to learn the modern web and frameworks like Laravel, React, Vue, among others." About a year and a half later, he joined X-Team. "It was really at X-Team that I took them to the next level, getting experience working both on internal tools and also partner projects. Since the team is full of very skilled developers and you're always in touch with them during work, I was (and still am!) learning so much every day, which was something I didn't experience before that I'm very happy with now."

Making Remote Work Actually Work

Remote work is the kind of thing that sounds straightforward until you try to do it across multiple cities, time zones and hotel Wi-Fi connections. Rocha has had enough experience with it — through Supernova, his first fully remote role and now X-Team — to have formed a clear opinion: routine matters, and it should be yours.

"I believe everyone has their own different rituals, but I think it's important to have a routine," he says. "We're not equally productive during all periods of the day, so experimenting and finding a routine that works for you is key."

For Rocha, that means front-loading the workday. Getting to lunch with the bulk of the work already done is a feeling he actively chases. But the ritual he values most about remote life is subtler: the ability to change the environment entirely. He has traveled while working several times and considers it one of the genuine perks of the lifestyle — not a distraction from the job, but a reason the job is worth doing.

In 2017, his first year of using remote work's travel perks, he called it a huge success. At the time of the interview, he was writing from São Paulo, visiting friends — which he described not as a vacation but as the logical extension of a goal he had set for the year: travel to as many places as possible and visit the people his international network had spread to over the years. That network extends back to a year he spent studying in Toronto and forward to friends on multiple continents he is eager to see in person.

A developer conference is also on his 2019 list — his first.

Personal Projects, Community and the Small Choices That Add Up

Rocha's personal projects reveal the same dual instinct — part play, part craft — that drove the RPG Maker years. On the whimsical end: a Python bot he built to automate niche corners of his life, including fetching good movie-theater deals and posting daily cat pictures from Reddit into a Telegram group chat. He was considering rewriting it in TypeScript and making it open source at the time of the interview.

On the tangible, human end: every time he travels, he brings a Magic: The Gathering card for the friend he is visiting — one he has chosen to match that person's taste and personality. He had collected quite a few already, with the long-term plan to display them on a wall at home. It is, in miniature, a record of where remote work has taken him and who he has met along the way.

X-Team's internal programs have fed both sides of that equation. Unleash+, the team's annual $2,500 budget, goes toward digital and physical games — including Magic cards and board games — and toward trying new restaurants when he travels. X-Team Seasons, the community challenge program, landed him in the top 3 on the Season 1 bounty hunter leaderboard, a result he was openly proud of.

Asked what lasting impression he wants to leave on the world, Rocha offered the kind of answer that sounds simple and isn't. He used to believe, he said, that one person couldn't make much of a difference — that a single swallow doesn't make a summer. He changed his mind. "Although I, as a single person, maybe can't make a huge impact in the world by myself alone, people as a community can definitely impact the people around us, and that's already huge."

The practical conclusion he draws from that is everyday and deliberate: be the best version of yourself when dealing with others, make choices that help people when you can, and trust that it inspires others to do the same. For someone who started out designing imaginary battle systems in a kid's game engine, it's a reasonable way to think about the code — and the life — still in front of him.

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