This week I saw a couple of Twitter threads (an example of 1 of them, PS is in Spanish) that made me think about my work-life prioritization and what’s the balance I have been pursuing, and why. I reached the apex of this thought when I received a newsletter about the same topic which inspired me to write today’s post.

First, let me tell you how I pictured work-life balance, my belief was to have a healthy one, you should avoid speaking of your work-life outside of work and your events during work. This behavior limited me because I could only emphasize with the team members I spoke with about my personal life, which took me a while to be open about it, to be honest.

So once I understood that talking about both was ok and that I enjoyed speaking about them, this made me healthily re-think my friendships. I started to understand that most of the friends I have were like my old self version, trying to separate things out and never speaking out loud about them, which made me question one thing, do we have a work-life balance? Did we hate what we do? Do we just do it because we have to and there’s no enjoyment in it?

I was the guest on the #1 episode of the new series of Agile State of Mind channel,

We spoke about deconstructing the Engineering Managers’ Role, a bit about breaking the rules, soft skills, collaboration on tech specs, and fresh air on what it means to be a real full-stack developer.

Grab your popcorn and put your Engineering lead hat. This was extremely fun to do, and it was really nice to be on the other side of the show (being the one being interviewed heh).

Since I went back to the leadership track I have been focusing most of my energy on giving opportunities to my team members to grow and giving myself time to mentor them during moments where I have knowledge that can be helpful that they do not have, now, you may think that this might not be the best use of my time as a team leader but if you think this I will strongly disagree with you, let me tell you why.

When I started my career as a developer, I was strongly focused on the frontend, I didn’t understand anything about APIs, Databases, and how the backend on the applications I worked on did anything. Everything was just magic for me. So when my company had to shift directions and required everyone to be full-stack developers I had to unravel all the magic by myself to continue riding the success of the company or jump into the lifeboats and navigate to a different ship.

I chose to stay and what followed was the most complicated days of my life, where I felt like developing code wasn’t my calling even though it was what I enjoyed doing.

A guide to set up my M1 Pro MacBook, why? Well, the last time I upgraded my personal computer, it was 2017 and I had a list of things that I installed on my dev setup at that point in time that honestly ins’t valid anymore for my current development process.

Heads up, the process might actually be easier than what I anticipated. Most software is now written to run on Apple Silicon.

By default MacOS puts the dock at the bottom and is always displayed. I’m one of those persons that like to run the dock on the left side of the screen and also have it hide when not used. This is to maximise the vertical workspace area. I also don’t love the behaviour of Big Sur that minimises the window into a separated view, so I change this config to always minimise to the app icon.

During this fall and after some health issues that I finally resolved, I wanted to explore nature more, after a bit of reading and hearing some recommendations I decided to visit this route.

In Girona we find this beautiful route of the Torrent de la Cabana which descends through the mountains and forms 7 small falls called Gorgs. This is a hike that most people would recommend doing during the summer, but let me tell you why it was great to do during this time of the year too.

It’s an easy hike, not too many ups and downs during the route, and you don’t have to have a great physical condition to complete it. I saw families with kids between 1-7 years old which means it’s a quite accessible route to do.

Inspired by a conversation I had with a teammate about my career and how I became a staff engineer, I decided to post a quick read on the things I feel shaped my career and the opinions I have maintained, changed, and kept during the past 10 years.

business case rises.

solution to the problem than writing the solution.

For the past 20 days, I have been experimenting with not having my alarm turned on. Honestly, I was a skeptic when I started with it, I had some words from Alexis (@duranmla) and his experiences to guide me and ease my doubts. Now I want to share my experience.

I had my alarm set to 8:00 am, which by today standards is actually an hour that not many can have their alarm set to, I have a great schedule and situation, I don’t have to travel far to get to my job, in fact, my bedroom is just 1 door away from my office where I’m currently typing this post while sipping a cup of coffee.

I have said it many times on my podcast, I don’t even work in the morning, my workday starts at 1:00 pm, and that’s because I love the morning to do my chores and go out when most people can’t or don’t want to.

The COVID-19 pandemic made me reflect on my life, you probably did it too. 2020 was an interesting year and I made some goals for 2021 that I didn’t make public and I believe this was a mistake, by obscuring these goals I had no accountability.

I’m planning to do that differently now. I want to give myself permission to try new things, and align my goals to my values and purpose. I’ll be sharing them in this blog post and I hope to inspire you too.

So let me tell you what I’m going to start doing from now on and expect to accomplish by the end of 2022.

As an engineer, I spend most of my time thinking about the best possible solutions for the problems we encounter, and as many engineers I know, I don’t spend nearly half of the time I spend on new solutions at updating, upgrading, and overall improving previous code I made.

That’s overall fine in our industry, for the most part, we follow the philosophy of if it ain’t broken don’t touch it. But what if we need to modify that code to add new things? Well, we are touching something now that isn’t broken but adding more complexity to it which means, more points of failure and possibly introducing new ways of breaking it.

At this point you are thinking, well, it’s time to refactor it! But I want to make you ask yourself, refactor what? Our new code, our previous code, the combination of both? Can we retrofit our new logic into the old one? If you can’t answer those questions with a resounding yes… Well, let’s say you are now entering “rewrite” territory.

I started to talk about a way to start investing on what I learned from peer to peer investing, but I didn’t explain what made me say “I need to start investing”, and I believe this is even more important than saying what has worked for me.

For me it all started in 2020, you probably know the drill here, COVID-19 hit different populations in different ways but I was paying attention to the financial market and seeing the drop in different sectors thinking how would this affect my daily life, I was too scared seeing the downhill trends in the charts on my Stocks app and it made sense, I didn’t know anything about it, so these lines where just lines going down in red for me, how could I not be scared of them?

Fast-forward a few months, and the recovery of the markets starts to be noticeable, all the charts show their graphs in green and the lines have an upwards trend, but here I am, seeing all this data on my screen and still not understanding much of what I’m seeing.

I found this week during my podcast listening sessions the concept of slow TV thanks to this episode of Invisibilia, to give you a resume of it, the whole concept is to produce a show with no plot, no characters, and surely no tension… Have you seen those live streams on YouTube of trains on Norway? Well, that’s basically it.

This concept on paper sounds so simple and yet, it isn’t. It made me feel uncomfortable for a reason, it made me listen to my inner thoughts and start thinking about the story of my life, it made me daydream of things and I should be doing or that I wanted to do and I haven’t done because I haven’t put the time to do them.

It all started with untaken trips that I should 100% do, but it grew further than that. Why haven’t I taken these trips? Why haven’t I put the time into researching what would make them possible? etc. And after a while contemplating the railroad and these beautiful nordic scenarios, it hit me.

I was giving some thought about my #programming approach using Test Driven Development lately and how much am I imparting the knowledge with my teammates of my experiences with it.

I must admit that I love the process and I’m not going to explain here what TDD is, there are many articles about it. I’m focusing this journal entry on one thing, the fact that it can be detrimental if you overuse it or use the process on the wrong things.

reported and allowing myself to understand the problem better by behaving in an automated way like the end-user.

It took me a bit to start writing about investing, at least publicly, because it has such a stigma with it, I’m not a financial advisor nor claim that what I’m saying works for me will work for you, but I do want to share these experiences hoping the best.

There are multiple vehicles to start investing, I have chosen more traditional means, but I got interested in peer-to-peer lending or better known as the P2P investing area, this is basically all about lending your money to people that want to take out loans from companies that aren’t traditional banks.

Before I start talking more about the topic, I want to clear something out, I started believing that lending was a shady business of corporations and pawnbrokers, but this isn’t the case, there are multiple types of companies and types of loans that you can opt into, more than you’ll be able to see in a lifetime.

Digging through my notes I found an article that spoke about the cult of done manifesto that I have saved a while ago and thought at that time it was an interesting way of looking at how you make and do things.

I connected with all these ideas and felt like it really represented my way of viewing how I wanted to approach growth in general. I’m someone that really dislikes procrastinating, but that also have a hard time at relaxing and just slowing down the pace, so banishing procrastination, in general, was a very interesting moto for me, I started with following the simple rule of “If you haven’t done anything about it, abandon it and move on to the next thing”.

That mentality has worked great to deliver different side projects lately, to grow my knowledge by reading, doing, and exploring different areas inside my job and outside of my job knowledge.

In January 2021, I launched the logbook, an app for people like me that want to do journaling with a more calmed down approach. At first, I envisioned this product mostly for me, I have tried multiple apps like mine in the past but haven’t enjoyed the process as much because all of them have something that I dislike, constant notifications, reminders, game theories, and other clickbait ways to draw your attention and make you use them,

So I said no to all those apps, and I built mine focusing on the core value of I want to journal when I want to journal and not when an app tells me I should, That’s how I like to journal and describe my journey towards completing multiple goals to myself.

It has been an interesting journey, and I must admit that I was quite scared when I launched this app and posted about it on producthunt. It received some really nice comments from the community, and it has been downloaded by people in 40 different countries.

Mostly known as “core team” or “architecture team”, are teams whose sole responsibility in the company is to improve the quality and performance of the experience that the end-user receives.

You probably heard them before and thought “… Isn’t quality and performance something that all teams should have metrics on?” Well… yes, but, and there’s always a but. Product teams run a backlog with new or tweaks of features that affect the business and most of the time these experiences are 90% there when speaking about performance and quality.

It’s that 10% that’s hard to achieve and requires more time or knowledge that most product teams can’t afford to have because the business has to keep finding new and better ways of engaging with the user.

I have been toying since the announcement of Apple One with the idea of moving into an all Apple ecosystem since I would be saving money by doing this.

Thing is… Spotify has been with me for so long that honestly, moving into an unknown UI/UX is so difficult, so that makes me think that even though I will be saving money by doing this, the annoyances and differences between the services might be enough for me to be loosing on features.

These are going to be my deep dives into the UX and UI of both apps and what makes them great or less usable in my personal opinions.

A list of the “rules” that I have been applying as my way to live for the past ~3 years and will continue doing.

I revisit these “rules” every year, and have found that in the past 2 revisions I haven’t added or removed anything from this list.

It’s not just about knowing the code or the properties in this case that you can apply to any element in your DOM. It’s also about knowing how each browser rendering engine will display your attributes.

Lately, the trend of front-end developers is to focus on JavaScript and learn all about the frameworks, V8 performance, and other elements that make these web apps interactive and fulfill their business intentions.

This is good, but it’s also clear that we have been neglecting a bit the CSS side of it, there are things like styled-components which try to break the barrier between doing CSS as we have been doing for decades now into the JS world and other similar tools, but that’s not the main issue. The main issue is:

I love journaling, mainly because it makes me rethink what I have done during my day and understand all the important things I have accomplished or couldn’t finish, and most importantly how that made me feel.

Now, to be effective with your Journal, you need to do various processes that you might not want to or have the time to do so and that’s when it all starts crumbling into less effective journal entries.

There has to be a better way of keeping the benefits of the journal but not having to do all the ceremonies? (Kinda a throwback to those discussions between doing SCRUM or Kanban hah), well, for me there is a way.

After a few months of doing indie apps on the side of my normal job, I have thought about key elements to make your apps successful based on it, there might be some obvious ones but I will still make the effort to point them out.

The goods and the bad ones, they are there, they are still hanging in the AppStore, do they have reviews? how many? How recent? What do people say in them?

This is one of the things I constantly check, at least once a week, because it gives me insights into what I could add to my app that people are clamoring on others and make them convert from their current one to mine.

It’s 2020, and we still have background: white websites when you enable your OS built-in dark mode, why? Why?! I get this feeling every time it’s 9pm, and I switch my computer to be in dark mode with the magic automatic setting from macOS and my browser stills shows me a white background at 300 nits of brightness.

I remember reading an article a while ago touting the browsers that support media queries for the dark mode, which had the following browsers:

Phew, that’s a long list… So… To detect whether a browser is running on a dark mode device or not, you’ll need support for prefers-color-scheme: dark media query, and as 2019 that was fairly new, but on 2020, boy oh boy, we basically have support for it on all browsers.

I used to be able to get by every day without knowing exactly how things made me feel. When people asked me how I felt, the answer was quite easy “I dunno. Everything seems ok so I’m fine”, and I was always answering “Fine and you?”.

So I started journaling because I wanted to know what I accomplished every day. This was a pain in the ***, not because it was hard to do, but because I had to invest time into writing things I accomplished every, single, day. So I asked myself, there has to be a better way of doing this?

Meet my approach to journaling — I got some goals I want to accomplish this year, and I only want to journal the things I do for those goals and on some occasions other things that just made me feel either good or bad but are worth remembering.

I have had the opportunity of grabbing a coffee with many colleagues, my latest one was with @sospedra_r, we used to work together, then we both quit from our previous company, and we didn’t… And now we are working together again. And that’s not my point.

My point is that taking a coffee talk with a friend, a colleague or someone that inspires you can take a profound influence on your work and daily life. You probably have been saying to someone “hey, let’s grab a cup of coffee when we have time”, but you are not making the time to make it happen.

You should. You should give yourself a moment to get inspired, have a nice conversation and discuss whatever is happening over your life, that persons life and live the moment.

I discussed this topic at my podcast a couple episodes ago, but if you don’t speak Spanish, let me give you my condensed thoughts here.

Designers have 1 clear advantage over developers, most of them understand how the customer acts and behaves. Why is this a big advantage you might ask? In a world where the tools start to become easier and easier to use, it doesn’t matter how you write your code that much, (yes, performance still matters and there are nuances to writing code, but I’m not going over complex code bases, that’s another topic.)

For most new endeavors or MVPs, a designer is now able to create a basic functional prototype and even connect it to a database like service like Firebase and start showing to the end customer how the app will behave and the customer can interact over a real application.