Retrospective 2018 Every year I spend some time in my retrospective and this year I’m feeling a bit ashamed to say that my plans didn’t end up as I originally planned and I needed to start a new life plan. In another hand, I’d like to start with a positive note, and I can guarantee I’m living the happiest days of my life.
Well, I started my digital nomad life and ended up as a digital homeless. My stable relationship of 7 years was over, and we share the guard of our son amicably.
I started my year in a solo mode, only with my bike and all my stuff fit in a 60L saddle bag that goes in my bike. I lived with friends for a few months until I decide to rent an apartment and start my new life. I lived part-time in Florianopolis and part-time in Sao Miguel do Oeste, the city that my son lives.
To be closer to him I decided to move to his city, and here we’re now. He lives half of the week with me and half with his mother.
Career
In the first days of January, when I was back from holidays, I start my new role at Toptal: Team Leader. I worked as a back-end developer mentoring other people during all my time there, and I was promoted to TL. I was pleased with all the stuff that I was doing previously, but the leadership was something new for me. I never thought about it, and I dedicated a good time learning about what was my next steps.
One book that was pretty useful to me was The first ninety days.
Every time I refer to books imagine I'm listening to the audiobook version :)
Another thing that I did a lot was taking notes. I really liked to take notes and spend time reviewing my thoughts in the paper. It helped me a lot to have better meetings and drive my days more productively.
This year I participated in the Leadership off-site, and it was a fantastic experience. Too many cultures and people that I work, but I never faced them before.
We worked, had meals, tours, and party together. All extraordinary people. Learned a few jokes from other countries as well :D
Participating in such activity was essential. Working remote have this gap and gathering are very expressive but they turn the job more productive in the long term.
People need to trust each other and such opportunity bonds people and create trust.
It was an exciting year, and I’m planning to submit some talks to speak at conferences. We’re open sourcing great projects, and I’ll evangelize about them. I’m also thinking seriously about starting speaking not only on technical topics but also go for more managerial/agile conferences. Today I’m only on developers conference, and I’m a big fan of live coding.
I quit drinking
One of the most critical decisions of the year. I’m 8 months without beers and I survived! I’m pretty happy with my life, and now I have even more time to spend with my son and do something healthier than drink beers.
I decided to quit drinking to spend more time with my son and leave my ex-wife in peace without being worried if I was distracted by something else than take care of him.
I’m in love with this feeling of being healthful and sane and try to expand what I do instead of keeping doing the same forever.
As a backfill, I spend a good time drawing with my son and listening to audiobooks to fill the time and adopt new habits.
I lose weight from 95 kg to 82 kg after the stop with the daily beer.
I got a bit sick and got some kilos back, but I’m pretty happy reducing from 125 KG to 88 KG in the last 3 years. My weight is stable, but I’m still not a lean person but much more accessible to live without carrying 30+ extra kilos :)
I lived with friends
My first months without a house I lived with Felipe Duardo. A great friend that was receiving people through Couchsurfing and I asked to stay for some time.
I had a fantastic opportunity to live with a guy that has a better lifestyle than me, and it pushed me to eat better and do more exercises. I learned a bit more about a paleolithic diet, and we had generous breakfasts in the morning talking a lot and sharing our daily stuff.
My son lived with us during January, and it was delightful. We never spend an entire month together, and he adapted very well. I cycled around 800 km in January with Lorenzo on the back seat \o/
He slept a few times as always :)
I also lived on friends houses’ while visiting my son. I started running with my friend Fagner and ran 50+ KM in the first week until I hurt my Achilles tendon.
Fagner is a great entrepreneur, and I had a great conversation with him about business, life, and future. Fagner is a dreamer, I always have great times with him.
We also spent our vacations together :)
I also lived in Willian’s house, and we have a great friendship. He is psychologist and we spent our evenings talking about childhood mindset, talks, job, career, future and so on.
He is a great friend, and I met him through Fagner as well.
For 3 months I got an average of 45 hours of bus per month, coming and going back to Florianopolis.
I got bored and decided to move full time to my son city, and here I live now.
My story with living with friends didn’t end up here.
I decided to build a dedicated bedroom in my new place for guests to visit me more. And give back as people did with me when I needed.
Follow me on couchsurfing and stay tuned!
My amazing dad life
I love my son, and he is my precious. I don’t know how my life would be if I didn’t have him around. During this year, he turned 7, and he is brilliant. He is learning Spanish and English in the school, and he is also doing extra classes for English and he is going very well.
Some days ago he invented a new game: In the game, I should say something in English and he would guess what the meaning of the message in Portuguese is. Pretty cool game and I started with colors, numbers and then simple messages and he got around 80% of right answers.
Now he is excited about collecting stuff, and he asked me to start a new collection, and he is accumulating coins from different countries and ages. With some luck, he inherited my older brother collection, and now he has a few coins to hold for the next generation.
I’m also encouraging him to start collecting comics books, and he is reading a lot. It’s very cool to see him around a book and start laughing after understanding the pieces of the story. Sometimes he also feels so excited that he needs to tell the story and it’s very cool to see him processing and to talk about what he read.
He is also learning to write some Japanese and eventually rolling some hosomaki with my girlfriend :)
I did a laser eye surgery
For some years I was expecting to make it happen in my life, and here I am. Living without glasses after 20+ years of adhesion.
The new life is comfortable, and I still tend to heart my eyes because before I was always being protected and know, I’m double caring about this until I get used to not have anything protecting the eye.
The most impressive thing after doing the surgery was looking into the mirror. It was the first time in my adult life that I was really looking at me having a high definition without the glasses.
I’m delighted with the decision and even having and small issue in my eye flap after the surgery on the first day, everything was adjusted, and I follow a healthy life in a few days.
Drawing
I drew a lot during my free time, and it was my own art therapy process.
I got really involved in this pattern and did some very cool pieces of random forms.
My first mechanical keyboard
I never thought about using a mechanical keyboard. I was pretty comfortable with my current keyboard, but after I saw the ergodox, I decided to buy one. This keyboard is pretty powerful, and you can configure multiple layers and have much more than a regular keyboard.
I’m a command line fan and having the keys configured with multiple shortcuts is
pretty cool. For example, if I hold z, it simply turns into control. I also created
a second layout where the arrows are on hjkl, and I can easily switch using my
favorite shortcuts from Vim.
I bought this mainly because I’d like to use in my belly and work in a very different position and even try to work laid or stand up. I got 3 hernias in my lower back because of 15 years sat in front of the computer.
I genuinely believe we need to find better interfaces for the long-term solution for people in long journeys in the desk.
I’m trying to adapt but still getting tired easily trying to play with the keyboard. I did some hour session and most part of the time I needed to concentrate on localize the keys.
I spent 3 weeks training during the night and adapt the keyboard layout until I get speed enough to start working. To not be in a random practice I decided to build the official documentation for fast and now it’s alive:
https://jonatas.github.io/fast/
In the new documentation, I’m trying to store some of my researches and share details about how I’m using them. I build a nice one about code similarity.
Audiobooks
My favorite books this year:
- Principles: Life and Work
- Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills
- Give and Take is also amazing.
- TED Talks the official guide is amazing for who is interested in public speaking.
I am still listening to Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst and Thinking Fast and Slow and both are pretty interesting.
Conclusions
My year was outstanding. I’m adapting to my new solo life, and I think I take the best decision to get closer to my son. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to do my work remotely and see him growing up every day.
No promises, for now, just looking forward to the new year \o/