The Last Software Engineer in Portugal

 

Maria stared at her computer screen, the domain name SWE.PT blinked back at her like a digital beacon. She had purchased it years ago when Portugal's tech scene was booming, and she dreamed of creating a community for software engineers in her beloved country.

 

In 2037, she was one of the last remaining software engineers in Portugal. The excellent tech exodus of 2035 had seen most of her colleagues leave for the megacorporation campuses in the Arctic Circle, where the naturally cold climate made quantum computing more viable.

 

The domain had become both her pride and her burden. Every day, she received emails from tech giants offering astronomical sums for this precious digital real estate—SWE.PT is the perfect domain for Software Engineers in Portugal. But Maria refused to sell. Instead, she transformed it into something unexpected: a digital museum chronicling the history of Portuguese technology, from the earliest days of coding boot camps in Lisbon's ancient buildings to the last hackathon held in Porto's wine cellars.

 

Her favourite exhibit was a virtual reality recreation of the now-abandoned tech hub in Braga, where she'd landed her first job. Visitors could walk through holographic memories of developers huddled over keyboards, the smell of coffee perpetually brewing, and the sound of mechanical keyboards clicking like typewriters.

 

The domain had evolved beyond its original purpose. It no longer stood for "Software Engineers Portugal" but for "Saving What Existed Previously in Tech." Thousands of virtual visitors would tour her digital museum every month, marvelling at how a small coastal nation had briefly become Europe's Silicon Valley.

 

One evening, Maria updated the exhibition, adding footage from the famous 2028 Web Summit, which had taken place underwater in Nazaré (an ill-fated attempt to combine surfing with networking). She smiled. The domain might not host job postings or tech forums anymore, but it had become something more valuable: a time capsule, preserving the memory of a golden age that had been swept away by time.

 

She renewed the domain year after year, even as traditional software engineering became increasingly automated. SWE.PT stood as a digital monument, reminding future generations that once, in this ancient land of explorers, a new kind of pioneer had briefly flourished – before they, too, had sailed away, seeking new digital horizons.