My 2019 Year Self-Review
Ho, ho, ho! this time of the year is here once again, the funny and interesting moment to look back and check what my New Year’s resolutions were, and what I’ve done and what I could have done better (or not).
For those who don’t know how this works, a quick overview…
I usually start matching my previous year ToDo’s objectives against some facts, to compare them in the most accurate and objective way.
Let’s start, first one!
Keep working / participating on interesting projects (crossed fingers)
I would say a big YES. Thanks to them, these things happened:
Do you know what is this? This is called “Go Live Together”, it’s a very cool feature my team helped to migrate on Android, at that time I worked at the Periscope team. This team is mostly based in SF with just a few engineers: two for Android and one for iOS were in London at the time. Then at the Android platform we made a huge cross functional effort to migrate and integrate it into Twitter for Android. “Go Life Together” consists on the ability to join (when you’re a viewer) the main broadcaster to start a podcast show on that broadcast and being able to chat “face to face” on that streaming video.
This was a very important milestone, and it really started a new adventure for me.
Do you know already why?
Thanks to this, I’ve been able to communicate and share what we have achieved this year on Twitter for Android not only internally but on really important Android and Multi-purpose conferences. By adding our First Dynamic Feature we faced some challenges and that taught us a few lessons, even gave us the brilliant idea to become speakers. Counting down, the first talk was in July with an internal event called #OneDroid where my colleague Lucas Yan and I talked publicly to the rest of the Android engineers at Twitter, we are about 50 engineers working on Android.
And later on, I tried to share our experience on four different conferences across Europe, this was a great opportunity as well as something I didn’t think it would have the huge impact and good adoption it had.
For instance, all started with the news of the Call For Papers (CFP) acceptance on the first conference, it was:
1 — Droidcon Austria 🇦🇹, in Vienna — https://droidcon.at/schedule/
I had a great experience during my stay at the conference, this was on September the 20th. And I was surprised for the amount of questions asked by the audience.
This is the tweet and some pictures thanks to Gema Socorro, another speaker at the conference.
Then I received surprising news, yes, I had a late application for this conference, but the committee apparently really liked my proposal, therefore I was selected to give the same talk:
2 — Droidcon United Kingdom 🇬🇧, in London — https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/14470-pushing-dynamic-features-your-users-want-as-quick-as-they-want-them
Surprisingly, a few weeks earlier than the day for the conference, people who attended this conference chose my talk to be at the Track 2, this was on a voting system based on people’s interest. The second biggest scenario was Track 2, I couldn’t believe it, since the previously maximum audience number, I had publicly spoken to, was about 110 people at Droidcon UK 2017, the same conference but two years ago.
But this didn’t finish at this point, apparently this is a very hot topic, and people wanted to see it more and more, so the order again got changed:
Oh my! Am I prepared for this? I thought. Obviously I wasn’t really prepared for it, but I practiced many times, all opportunities I had for practicing it I took advantage of them. I gathered feedback from all possible means, from the dry run of the talk at work, also from the dry run done on my own, as well as from the dry run done with my family at home (thanks! you know it wouldn’t be possible without their support!)… I really practiced so hard, don’t believe when a public speaker says two things: “it was easy and I didn’t practice”, always is difficult to get done a good talk, even more if the language of the talk is not your mother tongue, then you need to practice even more.
Then the moment happened, I had to give a talk to a big audience, I reckoned about 250 to 350 people during this Droidcon UK in London, but may be more or less, who knows! the room was quite big really, almost fitted, but not totally anyways. I was really impressed with the amount of questions I received again, I gave about 10 minutes of questions, and it was fully covered in time. Then after this, there was the lunch break, therefore more questions from the people waiting for it… I was extremely happy to see that interest on other engineers.
Below some official photos from the conference and above my tweet during that day, right before SkillsMatter went into administration, unfortunately, by now, the video recording of my talk is unavailable since it had a private login for accessing to it. I think, if this would have been public from the starting point, this wouldn’t be the case and now I could watch the video now. In my opinion, conferences and their videos should be open at all times, speakers put a lot of effort on their talks, the very minimum when a video is recorded, is to have it available at any time.
Then I thought this would be the last conference of the year, but like a month earlier of Droidcon UK dates, I received an email from another conference from its CTO to ask me about giving publicly my talk on a new conference. To be honest, it was the first time I heard about this conference which is called “GOTO”, actually GOTO conferences are taken place in a few locations such as Chicago 🇺🇸, Amsterdam 🇳🇱, Copenhagen 🇩🇰 or Berlin 🇩🇪. This in particular takes place in Copenhagen: it is a 360 degrees / multi-purpose conference, where a wide variety of topics are discussed. After checking its schedule and the confirmed speakers, this ringed a bell, Steve Wozniak! I thought… why not?!
3 — GOTO Copenhagen 🇩🇰 — https://gotocph.com/2019/sessions/1133/pushing-dynamic-features-your-users-want-as-quick-as-they-want-them
What can I see above at the screenshot?! Again at the keynote track (A1)?!
I can confirm, it was a bit of a pressure, knowing this wasn’t an Android related event, and very relevant speakers and celebrities like Steve Wozniak were going to participate and giving a speech there. However, I absolutely did my best, certainly I was a bit nervous, and yes, I had a combination of bad and good reviews of it after all. But in my opinion, it was not too bad.
Also the conference room wasn’t as full as Droidcon UK was, but for having a few tracks at the same time too, and being the first time at this kind of multi-purpose conference (probably no one knew me) I was happy enough with the final result. I am sure I can do much better in future situations.
My superpower is learning from my mistakes.
At the left side myself like a speaker, at the right side myself being myself, probably tweeting, taking some notes (or learning) or possibly taking a picture?
Then, the unexpected conference came into scene, Droidcon Madrid (Spain) was done late this year (20th & 21th December). As applicants, we received our CFP acceptance confirmation a bit late, a month earlier than the conference dates, but well, you know… even I wanted to accommodate a little bit of time for it, it’s my home country, many friends would be there too, and I had never publicly spoken in a big conference in Spain yet. Well, I certainly did a while ago, at Freakend Mobile Conference 2017 (a Jorge J. Barroso crafted with love conference which was in its last edition of 2019 managed with love by Nicolás Patarino), but I was a newbie on public speaking at the time. I could have done it so much better.
Sorry to tell you so much context, what I meant is… I was told by my friend Nicolás Patarino during this Google IO 2019, that they were planning to rescue Droidcon Spain, and bring it back again. There was a long break of it, like you can notice when you read the next article or chronicle, (Spanish only):
But then it came back last week in Madrid, at “Complutense” University of Madrid. I didn’t doubt to have a day break from my holidays to join the Spanish Android Community (AKA Fine Cinnamon) as well as the international audience who attended at the conference.
4 — Droidcon Spain 🇪🇸, in Madrid — https://www.madrid.droidcon.com/schedule
It was so nice to speak at my home country, meeting old friends, and socialising during the lunch and breakfast break!
I had a snap visit, so I met as many people as I possibly could in the little time I had.
This image on the left is the schedule of the first day, where my talk was allocated at the “AsyncTask” room, the biggest room for the conference at the Computer Science faculty. And very surprisingly for me, it was almost full, the capacity for it is about 250 people, and probably it had 200?! Wow! Such a good way to finish this year on the professional side.
Possibly soon the video (note it’s in English) will be available for Droidcon Spain, stay tuned!
The slides are here if you are interested in them…
In the end, this has been the year when I’ve given more public talks than ever. Totally unexpected at the beginning of 2019 but it has been really interesting.
This wasn’t all from the interesting projects... on Twitter, I switched back to my initial team, the wonderful Events Clients team, which is currently renamed to Search Clients team. Score cards was the very last nice feature we built as part of Events team:
Not only for the NFL, but for football (or soccer) and so on. Now I can follow up the score of the match when my team plays against any other team at the European Champions League or “La Liga” without using other extra apps.
Try to learn more about functional programming or deep learning or another interesting technical topic
For this one, I read articles, attended as many meetups and conferences as possible about the subject as usual like Kotlin Day London or KotlinConf, however I don’t think I’ve dedicated enough time to practice functional programming techniques, lack of time basically.
About deep learning I tried to do something during our biggest #HackWeek event at Twitter, I integrated and tried TensorFlow Lite on our Android app, and I was able to use our specific crafted model (done by Machine Learning Engineers & Data Scientists) for… super secret purposes! and it worked pretty well, even Kayvon Beykpour mentioned our project in a HackWeek projects review broadcast like one of his favourite projects of the HackWeek. On the other hand, and the technical side, I was able to migrate a Python algorithm into some Java code and play with it to make it work for our final goal. Sorry! I don’t only develop in Kotlin yet, for matrices I feel is easier to do coding in Java 😆.
For this I could still say…
Here it comes my real challenge!
Read more general purpose books — this year I only read technical ones —
I definitely would say yes, I made it!
Always look on the bright side of life
This is my last book of this year, and the first one of the next one, I believe Eric Idle is a real genius, honestly I couldn’t avoid buying this book when we were at the local Book shop of our area. I cannot wait to learn more about the Monty Python’s story and how they managed to become what they are for everyone, and precisely how this wise individual made it to live his life like one of the most popular comedian ever!
Other than this one, which is still in progress, I read a few more books like:
Fahrenheit 451
Set in a dystopian society that burns books in order to control dangerous ideas and unhappy concepts. The novel tells the story of Guy Montag, a fireman who questions the book-burning policy and undergoes extraordinary suffering and transformation as a result.
source: https://www.thoughtco.com/fahrenheit-451-summary-4176865
I really enjoyed this book a lot, this is based on the fact that our society tried to break the existing and established law by reading forbidden books and memorising knowledge before those books were burned, destroyed and forgotten from its existence forever.
The next one was a very similar topic… the most popular book of George Orwell:
1984
It’s set in the fictional future state of Oceania. This is one of three totalitarian super states that have come to control the world. The government controls every aspect of human existence, especially individual thought.
The novel was Orwell’s attempt to highlight what he saw as an existential threat posed by authoritarian leaders like Joseph Stalin. It remains a vital commentary on the techniques of brutal totalitarian regimes and only becomes more prescient and applicable as technology catches up with its nightmarish vision.
source: https://www.thoughtco.com/review-of-1984-740888
Concepts like… “the Big brother is watching you!” that probably you have heard about, or the well known term: Newspeak… Honestly, sociology, politics or people thinking subtle manipulation are such interesting topics, don’t you think? That is why I started during this same year with another one from a Spanish author called:
“Los Amos del Mundo”
The author tells about different secret societies formed a long time ago. Those societies have yearly meetings, where they can decide future worldwide geo-politics decisions and strategies. In a nutshell, conspiracy theories across the world.
Whether you are curious about learning how politics, society and thinking kind of work, I really recommend reading those books.
In my particular case, I am a very curious person and I always try to learn something new every time I can, so…
Other book I started but I stopped was about avoiding procrastination, but the best tip I can give you, it’s to stop reading about it, and take some action today! Yei! that I learnt 😂.
Attending amazing events & having a bit more of life balance (this could go together I believe)
I can definitely say, that I joined many amazing and interesting events this year, however, about life balance I am not that sure, because I’ve travelled A LOT! People can think travelling is “vacations”, and it feels like this sometimes from the outside, right?!
This year I’ve travelled three times to San Francisco (California, USA 🇺🇸), one time to New York (New York, USA 🇺🇸), to attend some internal events and meetings, interesting ones, don’t get me wrong!
I’ve travelled four times to different conferences to publicly speaking and tell about our First Dynamic Feature on Twitter for Android (mentioned in detail above).
Moreover, I’ve attended a few conferences to keep learning new things, like Freakend Mobile (Guadalajara, Castilla la Mancha, Spain 🇪🇸), ExFest (Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain 🇪🇸), Google IO (Mountain View, California, USA 🇺🇸) or KotlinConf (Copenhagen, Denmark 🇩🇰).
In addition to participate at some recruiting events like On Campus ones, for the next year summer internships at Twitter Engineering at our London office. For this, I travelled by train from London to Exeter as well as Cambridge during two following days.
I don’t want to bother you with many more tweets here and now, but if you are curious just take a look to my profile tweets, I am not lying!
Other than that, I’ve travelled for fun too, I visited Hamburg, Germany 🇩🇪 for a friend’s stag party I organised myself. It wasn’t easy but I managed a party organisation in a foreign country and synchronised about nine other friends at the same dates and the same place, mostly everyone coming from different places. Team effort, I received some help, not much anyways ☹️.
Furthermore, I visited one of my dream places to see this year, Iceland 🇮🇸! Such an amazing country to visit 😉
Really amazing, we drove a 4x4 car along the west side of the country for a week and a half. I would repeat this experience with my eyes closed.
Moreover, I visited Croatia 🇭🇷 for the first time this summer, one of the nicest National parks I’ve ever seen is there, Plitvice:
But Montenegro 🇲🇪 has one of the most beautiful landscapes ever:
By the way, some delight I recommend you to have to achieve a great life balance is “Horchata de Valencia” my hometown:
Keep running and may be participating on another half a marathon some day
About this one, I will not lie, I’ve run inconsistently, I miserably failed. I also had an injury playing football at an EPDR Picnic at work, but I got fully recovered in September, 6 weeks later. I’ve kept training for my own sanity, to keep my stress levels low, for making my best self suitable for the tasks to come. But I didn’t join a single race like the previous year. Something I wish I could, however, I will definitely try again next year.
This is one of the last times I’ve run in Spain this year, such a sunny day in “Andalucia” 🇪🇸.
This is it I believe, but thinking again in new objectives for the next year 🤔… I’m gonna keep it low profile, with similar objectives again to make sure the “life balance” is a success:
- Keep working / participating on interesting projects (crossed fingers)
- Try to learn more about functional programming or deep learning or another interesting technical topic
- Keep reading general purpose books
- Travel to amazing places / events & having a bit more of life balance
- Keep running and may be participating on another half a marathon some day sooner
This is a wrap, as usual, it has been so much fun to summarise all the year findings during the almost finished 2019. It always takes a while to take a look back, but helps me a lot to review my tweets and other social media sources and have a depth thinking before the end of the year.
Next year is right here, and the Show must go on!
Happy new year to everyone!
P.S. Thanks (a lot) to Cristina for the proof reading! And Jessie for her tweet as well as to Lenny for his super cool photo during the Christmas party.
