My 2019 retrospective

If I could say something about 2019, it would be: what a year!

It was probably one of the best years of my life, even with all the fears I had to face, the strength I had to find, and lots of other difficulties that are normal for every year.

The year began with a trip to Uruguay – Montevideo. The reason for that trip was something very different from what I am used to: it was to find if it was a good place to live. After that, my wife and I made two more trips for documentation, and probably by August, 2020, we’ll be leaving Brazil! This is a huge roadmap in my life, and I’ll probably write more about it later.

This was also a big year for open-source contributing: this was the year that Chlorine became popular, so I’ve been investing my time on it. It is wonderful and kinda scary to have a successful project (people start to rely on it to be working!), and it also taught me a lot about organizing projects – even personal ones. Chlorine also evolved a lot thanks for multiple contributors, and now I can easily recommend it as a real alternative to any other plug-in out there.

This was also the first year that I was invited to talk on meetups, instead of sending papers. On the total, I think there were about 4 invitations, two to explain functional programming on an university here in São Caetano / Brazil (where I live currently). Speaking of events…

This was also the year I went to my first international conference, that doubled as my first Clojure conference: Heart of Clojure, on Leuven / Belgium. Hands down, the best conference I ever went, and it became even better when I saw this post, where they even show how to “fork the conference” for those who want to try.

It was also the first time I traveled to the European continent, and to make sure I was doing the right thing on my decision to move to Uruguay, I also decided to make a small road trip to Luxembourg, Germany, Netherlands, and back to Belgium (I said a “small trip” but it was about 1600km!). It was also the first time I drove a BMW 1200GS, and the whole experience taught me to be glad for the things I have. It was somehow a “comfortable, uncomfortable self-knowledge travel moment”, precisely because I had lots of moments with myself while driving (driving on Germany is really smooth comparing to Brazil, where everyone seems like it wants to kill you on the spot!) where I could contemplate life while being concentrated on the road, and also lots of moments with myself on strange lands where I didn’t know a single person nor spoke a single word of their language (yeah, it was kinda crazy, but somehow everything worked fine).

This is also one of the things I learned: I can do things that are waaay outside my comfort zone! When I decided to go to Heart of Clojure, I intended to stay only on the conference, but while organizing everything, I just imagined: why not? And this reflected on other things too: I was invited to the ClojureScript podcast, then I sent a talk to the Clojure/South conference, both about Chlorine. This was a great year for talks, too!

For the next year, there are multiple things I want to do. I was able to land on a Clojure job (thanks PayGo for the opportunity) and I’ll probably learn a lot more – expect big changes on Chlorine too! I also have to learn Spanish (this will, hopefully, be my future primary language) and I really, really want to dedicate some of my time to learn to play piano (but this is probably just a “new year’s promise”, but who knows). I’ll not promise too much things here, to be honest, so these will have to do.

There is also another surprise… but I’ll not talk about it here for now :).