Wow! That’s the perfect word to describe my 2019. So far, my best year ever!

At Work

My 2019 started with me leaving TBFiles and joining Infraspeak. The change came as a surprise, even to me. I was not looking for a job change, but a casual visit to the Infraspeak’s HQ, to discuss the development of a Laravel related event, which led me to meet a lot of my (soon-to-be) colleagues and the company’s vision, goals, and culture, impressed me so much that I got stuck with the feeling that I belonged there.

My work, at Infraspeak, ranged from developing new, and exciting, features, to help to improve the overall code quality, improving the development workflow and stack used and implementing a Continuous Integration pipeline. I’ve been learning and growing so much! It’s definitely the best place to work, right now. Consider applying to one of our job openings.

There’s a lot more I plan to do here, in 2020, which I’ll blog about on Infraspeak’s Tech Blog.

Open Source

I did less open-source work than what I intended. In fact, I didn’t even complete 2019’s Hacktoberfest, with only two PRs made…

However, I contributed to the akaunting/akaunting and spatie/laravel-permission projects, created a side project that I’m still actively developing (SpeakHub) and I’ve joined the VOST Portugal organization, where I’ve been helping in the API layer development and maintenance.

For 2020, I’ll be releasing a beta version of my side project and dedicate more time to Open Source contributions. I’ll definitely not miss this year’s Hacktoberfest challenge!

Community Events

I tried something new in this area: I organized a Meetup around the Portuguese Laravel community. I tried to organize another one, but several things happened that made it impossible to create a second event. In 2020, however, there will be a new edition of this event.

I’ve also attended some events, too. I was present in the first Laracon Madrid, representing the Infraspeak Engineering Team. I met a lot of new people there, got to personally thank some of my favorite creators, like Christoph Rumpel, Freek Van der Herten and Adam Wathan. I got to be with other Laravel Portugal members and even fellow podcasters Nuno Maduro, Caneco and Bruno Falcão. I’ve also attended TechInPorto, a tech-related event in the beautiful Porto city.

For 2020, I’ll aim to speak on one conference, I’ll try to attend not only TechInPorto 2020 but also Laracon Madrid 2020 and I’ll definitely organise the second edition of Laravel Portugal meetup.

Publications and Podcasts

I’ve published three articles and twenty-one journal entries. It was amazing getting to write and share this much information with the developers’ community.

I’ve also been invited to participate in the amazing Ubuntu Portugal Podcast, where I discussed my transition from the Apple ecosystem to Ubuntu. I had a very good and friendly talk with the hosts Diogo Constantino e David Negreira.

Unfortunately, the Laravel Portugal Podcast only had one episode recorded in the whole year. It’s so sad that we (me and the other hosts) didn’t get enough time to do it more often. I always believed that a Portuguese podcast about the Laravel ecosystem makes sense to exist.

For 2020, I’ll definitely try to resurrect the Laravel Portugal Podcast, making it a once or twice per month event. Also, I’ll also make a weekly journal entry to round-up about work done and other relevant events. Maybe I’ll make a 2-in-1 and we might have a weekly Portuguese podcast about that. Who knows…

Final Words

This last year was a year full of experiments and trials and errors. As I close 2019 as the best year ever, so far, I look for 2020 with a lot of expectations to surpass the previous one. I’ll definitely begin to see the results of my work in Infraspeak, and will channel all my experience gathered until now towards open source and community development.

Wishing you all the best for this new year!