Balance of a great year (2016)

This is my first article in Medium, so, apologies in advance if this is not very polished.

Firstly, I would like to mention that usually I read very well defined and focused articles about many different topics, but usually Android and / or Java related, well, to be honest, as well as Clean Architecture, Material design principles, UX… even Kotlin and RxJava from a year to now.

What does it mean a great year to me?

A year when I can practice my favourite sport, travelling a lot, seeing my best friends, as well as when I can enjoy my time learning a lot in addition to look at articles and thinking

“Those seem really interesting, I would love to learn more about it!”

“why not to attend to these conferences about those very interesting topics?”

Indeed, a great year is a year you think you have learnt a lot, you have met interesting people, you have evolve both personally & professionally, you have had a good life balance, and you have gauged it a lot.

At my last 6 years I have spent most of them living abroad from my home country, learning about other cultures, actually getting used to change. Being open to other thoughts and ways of doing things.

However, this year, for some reason, is not just another year. Apart from topics I do not want to cover through this article like “Brexit” in UK, this is a year when very interesting technologies and new paradigms are out there for us, when TV series are showing us several things we imagined that would be great to have, or simply some stuff that some years ago we thought were impossible to achieve, and in the end, we are almost there, touching those incredible and amazing new tools or artefacts. Enough intangible material to make a real difference out there, there is time to persevere and learning more about all this.

Lessons learnt

This year has been a new UK year to me, before (2011–2015) I was pivoting between:

• UK (Cranfield, from 2011 to 2012 & London, from 2012 to 2013),
• Belgium (Antwerp, from 2013 to 2014),
• Spain (Valencia, from 2014 to 2015 & Madrid 2015), and then jumping back again to
• UK (London, from 2015).

This has been a new year in London to me, I could count lots of meetups I have attended, lots of challenges I had to accomplish, some uncertainty about many things to happen at a next future. I have learnt to do not assume anything, to discuss unlimited hours about interesting topics with smart people. I have read a lot, even more than previous years. Moreover, I would like to mention a sentence which I really agree with: “to learn, first you have to make mistakes”, of course I have made quite some mistakes, who doesn’t? and I have learnt a lot from them. Every day is a good day to self improve yourself. The best year IMHO, is not the year that was the easiest one for you and your comfortable zone, it is the year that challenged you the most and made you feel like you can overcome anything, this is the one.

Future challenges

At the one hand, I have a great challenge next year, since I will try being publicly exposed by writing more both non-technical and technical online content through my personal blog or here at Medium. I expect this little text is going to be a starting point. At the other hand, I will also try to speak publicly some time soon in the future. But honestly, what I will keep doing the most, is to keep reading, actually I am looking forward to receive soon a book written by the famous “Uncle bob”, please, bet what the name is

yes! you were absolutely right! “Clean Architecture”, a very expected book at the community, basically because many articles worldwide in Medium, many Tweets, online repos including my own contribution, called “Movies finder”, were based on that topic during the last couple of years. Of course I generally try to learn from others opinions, and again, my own mistakes. Our generation is very lucky that nowadays there are many relevant people from many communities, who help us to understand fairly new and complex paradigms. Special thanks to Fine Cinnamon’s Spanish Android community, from where I have learnt the most this year.

I would expect a long TODO list for following years, but I will start building it with few not easy tasks to accomplish

TODO list

• Proof learning of Kotlin language
• Being speaker at a great Android event
• Run another half a marathon some day
• …TBC…

Key points

Definitely I do not know if this has been the best year of my life, but I absolutely know that this year has made me grow a lot, and I have learnt way more than other ones. I hope this balance of my year will help you to be optimistic, BTW, this remembers me one of my favourite bands, Queen, has a very good song about what matters in life: “The Show must go on”, I drop you this master piece:

I hope to have as good experiences as I think I had this 2016.

Can’t wait for getting more insights and projects during the next year 2017!

And please, remember this other very very important point, also my reference is again to Queen, sorry, “Don’t stop me now!”