Long time no see... farewell!

In the past months my life has change quite a bit but not as much as it plans to change. Here's some of the stuff I've been up to:

• Got accepted in the University of San Francisco in the MS in Computer Science program, wooohooooo!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉

• Done a lot of administrative stuff for the student visa

• Left SAP - after a 4 year period my life at SAP has ended, and I must admit, it felt weird at first. But I am extremely excited for what comes next

• I have been working as a consultant:

  • Orbit29: great agency, with young and ambitious leaders who engage in projects related to health. We worked in a project for the Movember Foundation (and seems I'll be working with Mo again for the next month and a half). My experience in Movember has been a blast! Great team, even better people
  • Direct client: created a small platform to help some local businesses promote themselves

• Trying to finish my doubles-tournament library. It's been in hold for too long, hopefully I'll be done soon

• Been listening to Synthwave and some other weird stuff

• Read some awesome books such as Leadership Strategy and Tactics, Never split the difference, Clean Architecture, Greenlights, Stoicism for a modern world, The best we could do, 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers, Grokking Algorithms and some more in the pipeline...

• Binge watching Mr.Robot

New year, new house, new man cave!

In the month of January I have...

• Moved into a new apartment! Not only we have more space, my girlfriend and I now have each a personal office, extremely convenient as we both have many calls and can be distracting.

  She also gave me an amazing gift for my new office: a whiteboard! I love it!! I highly recommend one, the exercise of thinking while drawing/writing and easily erasing and re-drawing is so much fun!

• Added MailChimp to the blog! You can now subscribe and receive updates on my blog. You'll receive a maximum of one email every two weeks so hopefully it's not too spammy (and only if I have updated a new post).

• Inherited my mom's old iPad which I have been using heavy for reading. I used to read paperback books so it was a pleasant surprise to see that it is also quite comfortable to read in the iPad. Specially due to the backlight, it is a huge plus.

• Worked on a library to create round robin and brackets doubles tournament. It is an interesting project and turned out to be more complex than I initially expected. I'll write a blog post detailing more on this.

• Been honing my barbecue chef skills

• Finished reading Good economics for hard times- I highly encourage you to read it, this one and Factfulness, they'll both greatly change the way you see the world.

  Read also The Clean Coder - fantastic book. For other developers like myself with around 4 years of experience it was a nice and easy read, and definitely a mandatory one for developers who are starting their career. Every suggestion, recommendation or lesson are based on previous experience which the author doesn't sugar coat, and openly details his mistakes - to me this is a great reminder for oneself, Do not fear to commit mistakes, keep trying.

• Music: Marty Robbins, electronic music, Lofi

Christmas times, happy times. Let's go 2021!

In the month of December I have...

• Applied to several universities for a Masters Degree in Computer Science. The process is not fun, actually it is quite exhausting, and although the ultimate goal when applying is to get accepted, during the application process you do learn a lot. One of my biggest takeaways is definitely this: learn to write.

As the MS applications consumed some time, I haven't been able to do as much as I would have liked, nonetheless, I also have...

• Finished the book How to Take Smart Notes and I am almost done with Good Economics for Hard Times which is filled with fantastic information, not only on economics, but on how our world runs and how people adapt to it.
• Improved quite a bit in golang. If want to learn a new programming language, but you don't have much time to spend on a side project - which is the best way to learn - I highly encourage you to use codewars. Spend 15 ~ 20mins a day solving coding problems and not only you'll improve your programming language skills but your problem solving skills.
• Bought a lot of presents and received tons of fantastic presents! I love them all, I am so grateful to have such loving friends and family in my life :)
• I haven't deeply thought about what I want for 2021 but my #1 wish is to be able to socialize more :)

Merry Christmas everyone and happy new year!