Update and review of 2019

A lot of things have been going on this year, and I feel bad by keeping this blog so abandoned. There’s many changes on my site though, and way more activity but more on that later.

As my last blog post is about my return to fighting I start with those updates.

Fighting

I fought two times this year, one in March that while I felt good on the first round I end up losing in the second. And another one in June where I return to the win column with a 50-second finish.

While Id wanted to have one more fight this year, a lot of things happen that were not possible, trip, heavy workload, helping my pregnant wife, etc. It wasn’t a bad year either. I tried and tested different schedules of training to keep a saner work-fight-life balance.

Personal life

It’s been an absolute joy seeing my kid grow, this year started to speak a lot more, and was his first time in a beach this year in August for my brother in law wedding in Cancun.

The family grew too, after receiving our second son a couple of weeks ago on the 13th. I couldn’t be happier.

Learning

I’ve been working in improving my vanilla javascript knowledge and little by little is getting better.

I read a lot this year, reached a personal record of books with 16. Crazy that 4 years ago I wouldn’t finish one. I’m planning to create a book section on the site, but for now, this is the 2019 list in no particular order:

• Linchpin
• Do the work
• Mastery
• So good they can’t ignore you
• Platform Revolution
• Born Standing Up
• Zero to One
• Anything You Want
• The obstacle is the way
• The culture code
• Ego is the enemy
• This is Marketing
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic
• The book of the 5 rings
• Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed
• Lost and founder

Design

It was a better year than the last, increasing considerable my productivity by organizing myself and applying newly learned ways to focus more.

At Icalia I worked with various teams and was part of 6 product/projects shipped, supported 2 more, and facilitate and designed 5 design sprints.

Jumped into the Design Systems bandwagon

As a designer working in multiple products and teams, I suffer to keep a consistency and order. I will write a more in-depth piece about it but I’m proud to have pitched a Design System to the client, getting the green light, build it myself, learning a lot in the process and with the help of my amazing dev team with the migration, seeing it in production. All this would not be possible without the confidence that Icalia had in me.

Freelance

I had an IoT project where I designed dashboards for different applications displaying information and video that robots and cameras were sending, it was quite fun and interesting.

Another one that is almost finished is a web app for a Kiosk that is connected to a VR headset. Fortunately, I brought my talented friend Jesús Hernández to help me with all the difficult things. I will share more about it once it is finished.

This website

While I have abandoned this blog a lot, I’ve been working on this site little by little, indiefying it by taking ownership of my content. At the moment I now own my tweets in the notes page, and so my replies, photos, videos and likes.

I have also been working on a new design as the actual one starts to look broken as is not as flexible and ready for the new IndieWeb type posts that I’ve been publishing. I have big plans for the new look and I’m building a pattern library for this website to make it easier to improve and tweak in the upcoming years.

When I finish the first phase of the redesign I will make easier to publish content so I can write and share more, have a lot of good things planned. Side projects, meetups, etc.

So here’s for an even better 2020!