2020 hasn't been a great year in general. We have been stuck at home and we haven't been able to gather with people we care for or travel as we normally do.

This is why I want to start off this post by saying that I'm sorry for all the people who have lost loved ones. Also the ones that have lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

The year of COVID started great for me. I was feeling so motivated by the work we have been doing as part of the Live Nation website. To summarise, we were able to create our own design system, which allowed us to create beautiful, themeable websites with performance, accessibility in mind and fully covered on tests.

Dream stack made us dream with complex and now, achievable projects.

Happy times turned grey

My kid turned 1 year old and we prepared him a great birthday party on St Anne's Church, Limehouse, a huge room allowed all our closed ones to gather for the last time.

After that time, we started hearing a word that came all around the world from China. COVID19 was killing thousands of people over there, and the worst could happen and happened.

Lockdown

Two weeks before London and the UK were put on lockdown, my company closed offices and we prepared for home officicing for the months ahead.

At first, it was all great. We were safe at home with family, so I was feeling lucky to be in that position. My company even gave signs of immunity, paying the bills for every single employee for months.

I even had time for Open Source work. I contributed to nextjs, testing-playground, msw and some other trendy libraries.

My wife was taking care really well of the little one, so I was able to do work without distractions or interruptions. I was so productive.

Transition

Then, the UK Government put in place a great initiative, they were going to pay for 80% of the wage of employees the company wasn't able to maintain, but with conditions. And we took that path. Those in furlough, must not help the company with any work on the time they were under it.

That meant we needed to adapt to a whole new reality. A really small team to handle a whole platform.

Luckily, I wasn't on furlough.

After that time everything got worse. We saw how our wages got cut and how the work environment got... not bad at all, but weird. People were concerned and worried about their future. What was going to be the next thing hitting us the next day?

Plans

Before this year, we had plans to move back to Spain. After spending four years in London and having a great personal and professional experience, we realised it was time for a change.

We have to move on from this situation before it was going to affect us even more.

So my wife and I sat down one day and decided it was time for a change. A change to put us in a place of flexibility and comfort in preparation for the new year ahead.

I started doing interviews with some companies, mostly remotes. The first one I had was Shogun, at first unknown. I interviewed with a couple more, but they were experiencing a slowness in their processes, so Shogun was the first to offer and I couldn't refuse. I accepted the offer and waited 3 months (my notice period) to join my new team.

I want to thank all the people on my previous team for being so great at what they do and cope with those difficult times the way we did.

New Job

I started in September.

Remote, well paid, fun, diverse and great intelligence people are some adjectives I can come up with to describe my new job.

Being in ecommerce is the best end I can think of for this year in which everything moved to be online. Here, I'm being challenged to build the best and fastest stores with cutting edge tech.

I even took the chance to introduce good testing practices to the whole frontend team, which they felt grateful for.

Next year, new goals

In 2021, I want this pandemic over. I want my vaccine. I want to travel and see my family more often.

We will be moving to Spain soon, so next year will be pretty full of good things.

New home, which we hope it's built and ready for March. It will be so exciting to furnish and decorate it from scratch. Among things, I will be building my brand new home office in which I will continue to work for Shogun (because I can work anywhere in the world).

Professionally, I want to learn more about working with remote teams to become an even more experienced Engineer Manager. Because of that, I will be listening to a bunch of new podcasts and reading some new books. If there is something that I'm passionate about is helping people achieve their goals.

Another aspect I want to explore this year is on my mentority skills. I'm going to release a course (More news soon!)

Conclusion

This year made me realise about all the things I haven't done these past years and I want to enjoy in the upcoming ones.

Although it didn't hit me, the pandemic has been the talk of the year and when we win, I want myself to come up as a new me.

Do what you feel, don't wait.

Read about "retrospective"

2020 in review