Goodbye 20s: A decade in review

Today is my 30th birthday 🎂 and I took some time off to reflect on the things I’ve done over the last decade.

Overview

Ten years ago, I was coming back from Costa Rica, and I had just turned 20. I had no idea what I wanted to do. At that time, I was starting to work on building Pixel2HTML.

A lot has happened over the last 10 years for me. I encountered enough sticky situations and made enough mistakes throughout my 20s to teach me what I believe are valuable lessons. They were also a key time to learn as much as I can do about myself. People say one’s twenties are the most active years of one’s life. Yet, if you’d had told me 10 years ago where I’d be today, I would not have believed it.

Life

🛬 I was back in Bahía Blanca after an incredible experience of moving as far away as possible from home and living by myself (I was 19 years old back then).

🏡 I moved to an apartment, still in my hometown, after spending a few months with my parents.

🐈 Cleo came to my life, she was my first pet as an adult and the first life I had to be responsible for aside mine. Milo would join our cat family a few years later.

📦 I moved to Buenos Aires looking for new adventures and also to be closer to my business partners.

🎉 I partied a lot! From Creamfields to the Ultra Music Festival, and many many concerts.

💵 I started to pursue the path to become financially independent.

😻 I adopted Melania and my life got 10x times better.

🇩🇪 I moved to Germany.

🤓 I started learning a 3rd language (Deutsch).

📚 I read a lot. From technical books to philosophy, fiction, and poetry. If you’re curious about whats in my bookshelf you can follow me on Goodreads.

✈️ I visited 15 countries and more than 26 cities across the 🗺:

South America (3)

• 🇨🇱 Chile
• 🇺🇾 Uruguay
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

Central America (3)

• 🇨🇷 Costa Rica
• 🇳🇮 Nicaragua
• 🇵🇦 Panama

North America (1)

• 🇺🇸 United States

Europe (8)

• 🇪🇸 Spain
• 🇫🇷 France
• 🇩🇪 Germany
• 🇩🇰 Denmark
• 🇬🇧 United Kindom
• 🇳🇱 Netherlands
• 🇨🇭 Switzerland
• 🇮🇹 Italy

Work

💼 I founded two companies, sold one and the other become my full-time job for 9 years.

👨🏻‍💻 I coded a lot of things. Not all of the code a wrote ended up being something useful or is in production but I got the opportunity to try a lot of fun and interesting technologies (backend and frontend).

📊 I got invested in telling stories with data, mostly data scraped from third-party sources.

🗺 Remote working was my thing. I managed to build a team of +20 people from all around to world. Together, we shipped more than +1k projects for big brands, tech companies, and digital agencies.

🎟 I went to a bunch of Developer Conferences, Hackathons and Meetups.

🎤 I gave my first talk in public about CouchDB on a local meetup. In the next 10 years, I plan to do this more often.

🤹🏻‍♂️ As a founder of my company, in the early stages of the business, I took care of hiring, leading our engineering team. I also worked on sales and marketing.

🙏 I had the pleasure to work with my brothers, Juan and Tomas and help them to begin their career path as developers.

Family, friends & relationships

🕯 My grandma passed away.

👫 I have made incredible friends online and offline, friends that support my happiness, and I want to construct things with.

🥀 My parents got divorced.

❤️ I was in a relationship for 8 years. We did pretty well I think, we supported each other during moments of inner turbulence and growth. No doubt, we built some good memories that will last forever. And the best part, we had two cats who made our life super happy!

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 I managed to stay very close to my family, especially with my siblings, even though I lived in a different city or country.

Health & insights

😁 I got braces but 8 years after that my teeth are fucked up again.

🤕 I spent so much time working and I burned myself out.

🧘🏻‍♂️ I started to meditate.

💬 I did therapy.

🏖 I took a Sabbatical year off of work.

😬 I’ve come to realize that I am not always good enough, that I have flaws, that I can be a jerk (with or without wanting to be one) and that being a good human being takes effort and self-reflection.

Hobbies

📸 I took around 200k pictures, you can find some of them here. Now I want to focus more on filming and telling stories with videos. If you're wondering what is my current gear, here is what's on my backpack:

• Canon 5D Mark II
• Canon 24-70mm F2.8L II USM
• DJI Osmo Pocket II
• DJI Mavic Pro
• GoPro Hero5 Session

🛹 I got myself a pair of rollerblades and a longboard and started skating again. And my newest acquisition was a Boosteadboard. Riding it feels sick!

🌱 I started to grow plants, from legal to illegal ones.

Food

🍳 I started to cook more often and found that preparing a good meal for others is something I enjoy.

🥗 I was vegetarian for a few months. This gave me a lot of insights about my eating habits and helped me to add a lot of new ingredients to my recipes.

🍜 I realized that Asian food is my favorite so far. If you're in Berlin and want to eat Ramen get in touch!