2023 in review

Another revolution around the sun! I couldn’t be more grateful to life for giving me more time. More time to enjoy my family, more opportunities to become a better father and husband, more mornings where I can be delighted by the blue sky. I’m genuinely grateful. That’s my general feeling with 2023, but let me write down some specifics.

PHYSICAL

The year started pretty badly when a sudden abscess sent me from the ER to the operating room in a matter of hours. In the end, everything was okay, but I had to go to the local hospital once every 2-3 days for a few months to do post-op treatment. The result? I gained A LOT of weight in the first quarter of the year, and I’ve been unable to lose. So much weight, in fact, that almost all my suits and shirts don’t fit anymore, and I have been wearing athleisure for most of 2023. I want to change both things for 2024.

PROFESSIONAL

A very average year when it comes to work. I’ve kept making progress in my ongoing projects and even had a few offsites in Sevilla and Galicia. As it couldn’t be in any other way for someone working with software, AI has monopolized a lot of my attention, and I learned a lot about LLMs by doing the Spanish translation of one of the most popular prompting guides.

I continued my already initiated effort to reconnect with tech conferences with mixed feelings. During the year I attended Bilbostack -that included a fantastic talk by Gloria Langreo-, Tech in finance, TRGCON and Websummit.

I’m planning on trying some new stuff for 2024, but again, I’m pretty happy with the year in this area. More about it in the year kick-off post.

FAMILY

When my father got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer last year, it was a super hard moment for all the family. But the immunotherapy treatment he has been receiving has worked great, and the last scan done just a few days ago shows no inflammation or spreading of the cancer… it stays contained for the moment. I couldn’t have had a better Christmas present.

However, during this year, cancer killed a good friend who just had a baby, and another good friend had a miscarriage when she was 4 months pregnant. Bego’s had complications on severe tonsilitis that required hospitalization. As usual, these moments are a bucket of ice-cold water that makes you realize what is really important in life.

We were super fortunate this year and were able to visit many places: Bierzo, Costa da Morte, Lisbon and Iceland.

Iceland. Oh, Iceland. We returned for the first time since we left after spending most of the 2010s living in the country. I didn’t know how I was going to feel because some years have passed, and sometimes we hold just onto the good memories and forget the rest, but damn, I love this place so much. I immediately reconnected with the land, with the language, with the people, with the rhythm of the days. There is no other country on the planet where I feel so at home. Heima.

We had some ridiculously good weather, felt a big earthquake and saw a new lava eruption happening in our month there. But without a doubt, the trip’s highlight was watching Atlas playing with our Icelandic friends’ children. Life was very good with us.

The other big event for our family was Atlas moving to a new school. We were not very happy with the place where he went for kindergarten/first grade, and we decided to try a new school more aligned with our vision of how education should be. When we told Atlas, he had two tough days trying to process that he would not be seeing his friends of 3 years anymore, but he very quickly understood why we were doing the change, and his reaction made me the prouder father on earth. He is now going to OSOTU, a school where learning by doing, cooperation and critical thinking is at the core of everything they do, and he is supper happy. A super win in this area.

We had time too to do some block coding, play some videogames -he is so into Minecraft-, hike to the mountains and even raise some frogs at home from tadpole to mature individuals!

COMMUNITY

I had planned to do more community stuff, but we ended up participating in some exciting stuff:

It’s alright, but there’s definitely a lot of space to improve.

PERSONAL

Before Atlas was born, we watched +250 movies/year (yep, about one per night). But then raising a baby is hard, and then a toddler wants to watch Cars 2 fifty-two times in a row… This year, I have been trying to watch more movies and series because, when they are good, they don’t only provide entertainment, but very often, I find exciting lessons for life and work:

Then, at the very end of the year -all last month- I found a triad of movies that have resonated with me very much: Lobster Soup, Come back anytime and Bittor Arginzoniz. Vivir en el silencio. They all talk about the transformative power that developing a craft can have in us and the power of places to keep a social group together. I have mentioned many times that when I think about software development, I find much more connections with the world of gastronomy than with the world of architecture (that is both implicitly and explicitly the usual reference) I should write about it in 2024 to get it out of my head.

I even found about 60 hours in 2023 to play video games! Jusant, Death Stranding and Dredge come to my mind.

After two years of hard work, our building finally has a working elevator. It took a lot of pushing and supervision on contractors to do it as fast as possible, and even they finished with +9 months of delay! I learned a lot about how primitive project management in small civil construction is -compared to software- and the inefficiencies it provokes where multiple subcontractors must be coordinated.

I finally got forced to ditch my 6-year-old Macbook because I could not properly work with it anymore and replaced it with a fantastic Linux-powered Framework laptop. The vision of the company is such a fresh view on computing: focused on the ease of repair, upgradability, module reuse, refurbishment, recycled materials, etc. During my +20 years as an Apple power user, I accumulated many aluminium blocks over the years. At the very beginning, a few parts were easily repaired (battery, memory). Still, the evolution has been just worse and worse, to the point that today, you can’t hardly repair, expand or upgrade anything on them by yourself. I’m super happy to have the opportunity to test this more sustainable approach and eventually have a never-ending evolutionary laptop.

Finally, I had the opportunity to visit some good restaurants with my wife: Kromatiko for our anniversary and Kuma for her birthday. After many years focused on the perfection and consistency of execution when it comes to restaurants, I have lately surprised myself by being much more moved by the spirit that powers the place than any other thing.

And I think that is mostly it. Let me know about how your year went. On to the next year, 2024!

You can read previous year’s reviews: 2022