7 years ago
📦 Wrapping up 2016
The year is almost over. A friend of mine, Esteban, published a blog post, wrapping up his year and it inspired me to do the same.
Starting from my personal life, I unexpectedly met Maria José, my girlfriend. We were friends in the high school, and we hadn’t talked or a long time. Nevertheless, the world is sometimes not that big, and you don’t know when and where you can meet a person again. The fate brought us together; we met in Budapest and magic came out. After some flights between Berlin and Budapest I decided to move to Budapest, so I’ll start living there from January. I’ll be working for SoundCloud, the company I joined in October 2015. So far, it’s been the company I’ve been working the longest time with. It has a very inspiring culture, and it’s a good place to grow as an engineer because of its values, people and product. In 2016 I moved to a new team, Core Clients, working this time on tools for other developers.
In 2016 I’ve also attended many conferences, speaking about a project that we’re currently developing at SoundCloud, “Framework Oriented Programming” or “Apps Modularization”. All the slides are published on my SpeakerDeck account. I spoke at the following conferences:
I had the opportunity to meet world-class engineers and people, like Esteban Torres, who I have the pleasure to work with. Benjamin who I met at iOSCon, I still remember the very inspiring talk that we had in our way to the airport. Roy, whose open source contributions were part of most of my projects. Boris and his #yatusabes🍷 and Marius.
I travelled around Europe more than what I used to. Living in Berlin makes it easier since you can be in another country in just a few hours. I took the flights on Friday evening, and I flew back on Monday morning. I went straight from the airport to the office. Budapest, Granada, Malaga, Sevilla, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Scotland, London, Stockholm, San Sebastian, Logroño, Viena, Praga, Greece, Slovakia, Krakow, Switzerland, Verona and Morroco. This is how my mother sees me after 2017 full of trips.
I started a newsletter and quit it after almost ten issues. Thanks to it, I had interesting discussions with Raimon since we had similar concerns about the topics I talked about. I kept writing articles. One of them, In a world… became very controversial in the iOS and Android communities and had a lot of retweets and comments on the social networks. Another one, Micro Features Architecture for iOS turned out to be attractive to the community and got almost 100 likes on Medium.
I published on a new spare-time project with Isaac, GitDo, and stop its development to focus on a new project with Sergi and Ana, Caramba. We’d develop and design our apps as we did when we started as developers. So far we’ve developed multiple apps, Open Source projects, and written numerous articles that we’ve shared on GitHub and Medium respectively.
I’ve tried to read more this year. Among other books, I’ve read: Peopleware, Tribe, Who moved my cheese?, Drive - The surprising truth about what motivates us. I started using GoodReads to track them and get recommendations based on my reads and my friends’ lectures. You can find me as @pepibumur on the platform.
2017 - What’s coming?
Languages have been a challenge for me. I want to keep improving my English this year, and try with a new language, which will most likely be German (yes… now that I moved to Budapest). I also want to learn a new programming skill. My focus, since I became a developer, has been iOS. I learnt Objective-C, and later Swift. However, when it’s about the web I know just a little. While I know how to develop and app from scratch and ship it to production, I don’t know how to do the equivalent with a website. I’d like to be able to code a frontend (HTML and CSS) and include some client Javascript logic. Moreover, Swift can be used in server environments and macOS applications. I’d like to explore Swift on the server side, implementing a backend on Swift, and learn about AppKit and learn apps development for macOS.
I’ll keep writing and sharing my learnings in the open. I’ll be in Budapest most of 2017, but I might consider moving somewhere else… Looking forward to starting 2017.