I’ve been away for quite some time now and a lot of things have changed since I last had the time to blog.

I’ll try to detail everything that has happened in my life in the past few months and also prepare for my yearly wrap-up post.

Brewbot 🍺🤖

Last time I blogged I was working for Brewbot and living in 🇨🇷 (I’ll cover this part later). Sadly things went south and as many startups ended up belly up…

Details about how or why that happened are not importante honestly and I won’t dwell too much into it; let’s summarize it by saying that after I got the 👢I had to look for different options to keep my family and 🏠 afloat.

I worked for a couple of months with a friend on his company and then jumped to yet another agency for the time being.

All of this was just temporarily because while I was at iOScon I bumped into Pedro; an iOS developer from SoundCloud that I’ve met on Twitter before and who told me that SoundCloud was looking for iOS engineers if I was interested.

The idea was interesting and exciting but I was enjoying what I was doing at the time… that was until the day before I was due to give my talk when I was informed that yet again I was not going to get paid… and then I decided to start my process with SoundCloud.

TL;DR version

I joined SoundCloud on October the 1st…

Relocation

During the whole interview process me and my (by then girlfriend, wife now) discussed a lot about the implications of actually getting hired by SoundCloud; like having to relocate to 🇩🇪 for example.

After discussing all the pros and cons we were on board in case we ended up in that situation.

Spoiler alert We ended up in that situation 😝 The visa process wasn’t hard but wasn’t smooth either due to the fact that I was the first costarrican to be relocated to 🇩🇪 by SoundCloud and that prooved a little bit harder than anticipated.

Hunting for an apartment 🔫

I’m not going to go into lots of details here… suffice to say that looking for the right apartment… scratch that; for A apartment is surprisingly hard in Berlin… given that this is a city with a lot of movement, people coming and going the demand is high and getting an apartment felt like applying for a job… for your first job…

You try to give them a great impression (hard to do so given that you only talk with the real state agent while you are looking at the apartment with another 20 or so people…). Is hard to make a lasting good impression under this circumstances.

It took us 2 months and a lot of frustration but we were able to get a nice apartment in Prenzlauer Berg 🎉

Now I get to come to the office riding my 🚲 (As a side note… I came to the realisation that I haven’t ridden a bike since I was 15 or so… 😭 I’m feeling it 😂)

OSS & Conferences

During the beginning of this year I had my mind and heart set on giving many conferences and contributing as much as possible with OSS projects (mine and others).

I accomplished both of those resolutions to the point that I spoke at 3 different conferences pretty far away from home.

  1. iOScon • London, UK
  2. NSSpain • Logroño, Spain
  3. Mobilization • Łódź, Poland

And got involved in many different OSS projects.

Now

That being said I think I’m going to step down from OSS for a while and will apply to far less conferences this year.

Reasoning for this is:

  • I feel like I’m trying too hard to come up with nice and interesting topics for conferences… this shouldn’t be the case. I should be talking about stuff that I’m passionate about or that I like. I have one more topic I would love to talk about so I’ll try to make it to at least one conference in 2017 where I’ll hopefully be able to talk about this topic 😄
  • I’ve stretched myself too thin trying to reach into a lot of OSS projects and lately I’ve not been able to provide a decent response neither in time nor in quality; also given that now I have to commute I don’t have as much «free» time and the one that I have I’m spending it playing with my son as much as I can while he still enjoys it 😄 I want to apologize to all those maintainers of projects where I’ve been given the responsability to help maintain the project; I’ll stay as a supporter and will try to help every now and then but I won’t be as devoted to it as I tried during the first half of the year.