A programmer with an interest in politics and spending transparency. That is how Daniel Ferreira, just 18 years old, describes his interests, which even earned him a nickname: “humanities dev [developer],” as his friends call him.
Admitted to Stanford University in the United States, considered one of the best in the world, Daniel developed, at 15, a website that lets users access, search, and compare the Federal Government's public spending.
He attended a private school in Valinhos, in the interior of São Paulo state, and participated in Fundação Estudar's Prep Scholars program, which helps high-achieving students apply to universities abroad.
Self-taught, the young man began programming when he was 11. While exploring a smartphone his father had given him, he discovered he could modify the device's system — such as changing icon colors and adding music albums to the home screen.
“It was not a specific interest, it was an interest in a challenge,” Daniel explains. It did not take long for the young man to start visiting programming forums online, where he learned to make smartphone apps. One of them, which gave his schoolmates easy access to their grades, earned him a “threat of a lawsuit.”.
“The school did not understand what it was. They forced me to take the application offline. It was kind of sad; I was very frustrated,” he says. “That was when I took a break from programming. I started following the 2014 elections very closely, attending school debate groups and UN [United Nations] simulation groups,” the young man explains.
“One thing that really bothered me was that people said the government spent too much, but they could never say exactly how much it spent or what it spent it on,” he says. That was when Daniel had the idea of developing his first website, since, according to him, the government budget expenditure data made available by the Ministry of Planning were “encoded.” “Nobody could understand that format,” he says. “Everyone should have the opportunity to program”
Daniel's experiences combining programming with the humanities paid off: even before finishing high school, he began participating in a USP (University of São Paulo) research group on public spending. He was also hired by an online payment startup to develop the integration of credit card terminals into the company's system.
“I have always programmed because I liked it, not because I wanted to do something specific. Everyone should have the opportunity to learn to program,” Daniel argues. However, he emphasizes: “nobody should be forced to learn programming. I am afraid it will become something like Physics classes today, for example — many people are not interested in the subject and will simply forget it afterward.”.
Stanford and the future
Although he still does not know exactly which field he will pursue in the future, Daniel says he has decided to do “something related to computer science and something related to sociology and history” during his first years at Stanford, when the curriculum offers greater flexibility.
There is one thing, however, the young man is certain of: he will continue advocating transparency in public data. “If a window of time opens up, I will probably invest in the transparency data website to analyze campaign donations, for example. There are open data about that today, but not much analysis, and it is something I really enjoy,” he says.
Links
- https://educacao.uol.com.br/noticias/2014/08/15/seis-universidades-brasileiras-ficam-entre-melhores-do-mundo-segundo-arwu-ranking-de-xangai.htm
- http://www.cbsi.net.br/2017/04/brasileiro-aprovado-em-stanford-aprendeu-a-programar-aos-11-anos.html
Nine years later
The website went offline
The gastospublicos.com.br, the project he created at 15 that led to this story, no longer exists — the domain does not even resolve in DNS. It is a common fate for a student's personal project: college begins, time runs out, the domain expires.
That does not diminish the achievement. It would if the idea had died along with it — and that is not what happened.
Where he is today: an honest caveat
We looked. And decided not to publish.
Daniel had a news cycle at 18 and was never a public figure; nine years later, he is an ordinary person entitled to his privacy. His name is common enough that any profile found in a search could belong to someone else — and attributing the wrong career to someone is real harm, not an editorial detail. If he ever wants to tell us what he has done since then, this space is open to him.
What we can follow without intruding is what he said he wanted to advocate. And there, yes, history unfolded.
The transparency he wanted, today
The problem that motivated the project — “government spending data were encoded; nobody understood that format” — has largely been solved, through paths that barely existed in 2017:
- The Transparency Portal gained an API. It is no longer just a screen for searches: there are endpoints for open data with filters, and spreadsheet downloads of queries. The collection he performed by scraping pages can now be automated.
- The
dados.gov.brbecame the central catalog of federal government open datasets, with a standardized format. - Querido Diário, launched in 2021 by Open Knowledge Brasil, tackles the most opaque level of all: municipal official gazettes. It collects, unifies, and makes searchable what used to be scanned PDFs on city hall websites.
- Operação Serenata de Amor — “Rosie,” the robot that audits parliamentary allowance reimbursements and flags suspicious cases — became the country's best-known civic innovation project. Today it is maintained by Open Knowledge Brasil, with less frequent updates, but its entire legacy is open source.
None of these initiatives is his. But they all prove that his bet was right: the transparency bottleneck was never a lack of laws; it was a lack of people turning raw data into something searchable. In 2017 this was a teenager's hobby; in 2026 it is a field with organizations, funding, and mature tools.
And the self-taught path has changed
It is worth noting how much easier things have become since he was “visiting programming forums” to learn:
- The data he had to scrape are now available through an API.
- The question-and-answer forum became an AI assistant in the terminal, which answers immediately, without sarcasm and without “this has already been asked.”.
- The infrastructure to publish a website like his now costs the price of a snack per month — or nothing, on a free plan.
What has not changed is the hard part: having a question worth answering. Tools have become cheap; curiosity remains the scarce raw material.
About the statement he left us
The interview's most interesting observation has aged very well and is worth rereading: “Everyone should have the opportunity to learn to program — but nobody should be forced. I am afraid it will become something like Physics classes today, which many people are not interested in and then forget.”
Said by an 18-year-old in 2017, at the height of the rhetoric that “everyone has to learn to program.” Nine years later, with schools adding programming to the mandatory curriculum and AI assistants writing much of the repetitive code, the distinction he made between opportunity and obligation has become more relevant, not less.
To continue: the main programming languages is the map for where to start, and in-demand IT jobs shows where that learning leads.