As my therapist said: 2020 was a year that put brakes on the whole world. And yet, for me, it was one of the best years of my life by far – maybe with the exception of 2012, where lots of other wonderful things happened too.
On this year, my daughter was born. There was also the covid-19 pandemic (yeah, it’s obvious right now, but maybe some years from now someone reading this post will probably not remember that it did exist) so if you join these two things, you’ll see how worried I was. It was always my wife’s dream to be a mother, and to have me at her side on the delivery room, but because of the pandemic, this would not be possible… or would it?
At that time, I was still living in Brazil. There are laws over there for the expecting mother to have someone helping her on the birth process – and we did use these laws so the hospital would be forced to accept that I would be with her. They tried to persuade me to not do it, multiple times, until I was able to get the maternity’s director cellphone and talk to her. So, yes – I was there, saw my daughter born, and I was with my wife’s and my daughter the whole time! It was probably the most incredible, magic moment of my life: when my daughter was born, she stayed with us the whole time, dimmed lights, looking at us. Recognizing us. She kept biting my fingers (when my wife had to rest for a while), and even today (she’s 6 months now) it’s one of her most enjoyable actions: to grab my fingers and gently bite then.
Then, there was another fight moment: to get my daughter’s documents when most documentation’s offices on Brazil were closed. For people that don’t know how this works, documentation in Brazil is not centralized: your “birth certificate” is emitted into a “registry office”, the ID is from a department that’s subordinated to the police, there’s also another obligatory document that’s emitted from other office, and you will accumulate some other documents that also are emitted from different offices – let’s be honest, it’s a huge mess. As this “Identification Department” is TOO SLOW, it was delegated to some other departments, but they were also closed because of covid. Twitter helped me a lot – I made lots of posts and I was able to get help for my daughter’s documents faster. The last “fight moment” was to be able to get my daughter’s authorization from the Uruguayan government, so she would be able to travel.
Then, came the “flight” moment – we left Brazil, probably for good. We came to Montevideo/Uruguay, and so far, our life here have been great! Unfortunately for us, the COVID cases started to grow here, but let’s be honest, at least people are aware that this can pose a problem, differently from Brazil where almost everybody kept downplaying the problem.
As for tech, this year have been great for Open Source projects, with Nubank/Cognitech funding lots of projects. I still hope that they’ll be an example for other companies. Chlorine advanced A LOT too – there’s now a config file, fully written in ClojureScript, to configure Chlorine. This made possible to port most of the interesting features to VSCode’s version Clover, so now both have almost the same features – the only one missing in Clover is the ability to add custom HTML tags, but we’ll get there (probably…)
I also talked on some more conferences: made my first Spanish talk ever in the Montevideo Javascript Group, one in the re:Clojure about Chlorine (and you know what’s amazing? When I submitted this talk, Clover was not usable yet… and on the conference’s day, it was a serious alternative!) and that made possible for me to keep talking with SciCloj project – maybe we’ll see REPL-Tooling being spitted into more specific libraries, or used on notebooks-like code, who knows?
One of the things I’m quite proud is that last year, I also talked about Chlorine in a conference, showing some future ideas of the project. I’m happy to say that lots of the “future ideas” of the project were implemented on these last versions, and that the solution I went with was better than what I was thinking at 2019.
So, I can say that, even with 2020 putting brakes on everyone’s projects and dreams, we made it! It was indeed one of the best years of my life, and I’m sure it’ll be remembered for lots of years to come!
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