Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow – Anita Desai

Recently I decided that It was time for me to move on from Makers Academy and continue my journey.

Working at Makers Academy has been a great experience. I met really wonderful people and new friends. The feeling and pride of helping people to learn how to code has been great; my heart will always have this warm feeling about my time there.

At the time of writing I am still unsure what to do, there are some amazing offers on the table, some crazy ideas and a ton of uncertainty. My decision at the moment is not to decide on anything. I am spending the month of December in a sort-of-sabbatical where I will try not to think about anything concrete (this is proving difficult as my brain is finding idea after idea at the moment).

I am in that figurative crossroads looking into the different paths thinking to myself: _“Which one of these has dragons and which one will lead me a little closer to mastery?”

If you have any idea of what I should do, let me know, I am all ears for any proposal (not deciding yet though).

Oh, one last thing, regardless of the decision I have created a newsletter: Enrique’s week in a bottle (you can also find a link on the sidebar).

When I had the idea for patheleven I wanted to bring together a great team of people that wanted to grow and help other people grow together. The main goal was to change the way we work and interact with our customers and our surroundings.

During our time we learned a lot of valuable lessons and we learned what we did and didn’t want from a company; it was a great adventure.

As you know, we all disbanded and went our own ways to enjoy doing what we like doing, but also to have a break from what we did with patheleven.

Having a small boutique software development shop is a really tough business, we weren’t just building software for our customers, we were always trying to exceed their expectations! This is really hard on every individual on the team and so, we needed a rest…

Why am I writing about all this then?

My main motivation has always to help other people, see them grow and grow myself in the process. At the same time though I am a person that loves a certain lifestyle. I love nature and the mountains, I enjoy running and really nice coffee ( maybe I should start a coffee roaster ). I want to be able to do all these things whenever I feel like doing them; I want to spend more time in nature exploring.

At Makers Academy I have an amazing job and responsibility with an amazing team of friends. It’s amazing what we do and how we are able to change the life of the students that come to the course. It’s not really a job, it suits my lifestyle. Yes, sometimes it is very hard, and frustrating, but at the end it pays of to see this amazing people, our students, having accomplished what they have in such a short time!

Still there has always been this idea of patheleven nagging me in the back of my head. You might hear from it soon, or maybe not …

They say that it takes about 14 days to form an habit. Committing every day to a project is actually quite hard, we want to do this for the next 100 days…

So yesterday I announced the idea Roi and me had about committing every day to github.

Today I set up a new project, chronicler to start working on it for some time.

Chronicler is a blogging service that will focus on the content creation and ease of use. I want non-technical bloggers not to have to worry about anything but their content.

The code will be open source, but I will add a service as well for those who don’t want to deal with the technicalities of setting a chronicler instance up ( big words… I haven’t even really started with the project and I am talking about these things already ).

Wish me luck with it and if you like the idea ( once you see a little more of code in the project repo ) maybe you can chip in and help?

All this will not be finished in the first hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

John F. Kennedy

So my friend Roi and me have started this thing… a 100 days of creating content, or rather a 100 days of pushing code to github.

Coding is a passion of mine, but recently I have been working mostly on private projects and repos, which is great, but we want to produce things that are useful for people as well.

There are a ton of projects and ideas that one can build to help, and I am going to start working on some.

I am thinking about a blogging engine that I thought about a while ago, but never got to work on as I somehow had the idea of it being a commercial product ( also I wanted to use it myself for blogging, maybe I will, maybe I will just create it and let others do it ). This might be a good starting project, I will see. The important part is working on something, many different things, to create the habit.

Wish us luck and, hey if you have an idea that you don’t mind to be an open source project, just let us know!

Usually I keep dot and configuration files somehow on github so that I can retrieve them in case of a mayor disaster ( laptop blowing up, etc ).

The other day I was pairing with a friend. I decided I wanted to share with him my remote pairing configuration…

WTF!!! WHERE DID IT GO?!?!?

Not to long ago my trusted MacBook Air stopped working and I changed it for a Makers Academy MackBook Pro ( a really nice machine if you ask me ). Given that I am not working remotely at the moment I didn’t have any tmux or my trusted configurations setup… a real bummer

So I quickly installed it and went through it with him, but having learned the lesson, I added it to my github for future reference.

If you are remotely interested in my tmux configuration you can take a look at it here.

“Hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.”

—Neil Gaiman

Yesterday we had a wonderful Talks Night ™ at Makers Academy! If you haven’t ever been to a Makers Academy Talks Night and you happen to be a student at our academy, you definitely should!

In a Makers Academy Talks Night you will learn a lot of things that you possibly didn’t know about, like how to produce music, how to save money by batch-cooking, Venezuela, Singapore, women in tech, … you name it It is a really great evening and the kudos really go to all the students, but specially to those who had the courage to stand in front of everyone giving a talk!

I wanted to write a little about this concept, I have been talking about a little for the last five years or so, as I gave a talk about it during our Makers Academy Talks Night yesterday; Mushin no shin.

Your brain does many things to cope, specially when under perceived stress conditions (learning in a bootcamp counts as such), it might default to fear (or rather anxiety), anger or ego. These are all natural emotions that we all experience in our lifetimes (sometimes even multiple times a day). The problem with all of them is that they will not help you in those situations that require your full attention.

Your mind is troubled and there is a lot of chatter that does not allow you to react to the situation at hand as you are to busy inside your emotional state. Mushin no shin, or the mind that is no mind is a state in which your mind is not fixed or busy with thought or emotion, but rather open to everything. It is an ideal mind state in which you can absorb knowledge at incredible speed.

It is a difficult state of mind to achieve and to keep, but as everything we do, it’s not about how easy it is, but how much we invest in it for our own sake.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Another year has passed, and it has been a quite interesting year. A lot of things have happened in this past 12 months.

I wanted to write this post as a retrospection on what has been happening in this past year, but I feel like this would be dwelling in the past, something I advocate not to do to anyone that asks me. So following my own advice I am going to just say what I do want to do in 2014.

I want to spend more time exercising

By the end of last year I began to run again. This is a mayor achievement for me (I need a badge for that!) as I haven’t exercised in ages before that. I have found that running gives me some peace of mind, similar as meditation does for a lot of people. I definitely want to keep on doing this and set time aside for it (hopefully every day).

I want to write more

Writing is hard. You need a lot of alone time to be able to do this (writers confinement). At times I have a lot of drive to write and it seems that I cannot stop doing it, but other times no single word comes out of my hands. I want to do this more. This Christmas I set a little task for myself (which I have been doing) of writing every morning some thoughts, an account of the past day, or just about anything that was on my mind. I hope that this new year I will be able to produce more writing.

I want to write more software

I actually write a ton of software. I code every day on different languages and things to satisfy my ever growing curiosity. What I feel though is that I want to release more products to the world. Not as a capital gain or to make any successful business out of them (although that would be welcome as well), but to actually produce something that people can use in their daily lives that will help them somehow.

I want to reach out more to my friends

I love my friends! They are all over the globe and meeting them is always linked with a trip to somewhere else. The problem with me is that I am not really good at communicating with the people I hold dear when they are not around. It’s so easy to fall into the daily grind and forget to tell someone you appreciate that you are thinking about them. This year I am going to try to do that more and keep in contact with my friends (If you are one of them and you are reading this, I am really sorry that I suck so much in keeping the contact alive).

I want to loose and gain some habits

Last year I spent a lot of time reading about habits and living a simpler lifestyle. This is something that resonates with me. I have been working on that over the past few years, and I want to continue doing that. Life is simple, we should keep our lifestyle simple as well.

Other than that I think that I will keep on helping as many people as I can (easy with my current line of work).

I was about to open my email client and start sending Christmas emails to everyone I know. Then I thought that maybe I should first write this blog post.

This time of the year the lucky ones amongst us gather with family and loved ones to celebrate; some for religious reasons, others as an excuse to spend some days together once a year.

There are some amongst us, less lucky, with no place to go. For those of you, who have nowhere to go or no family, loved ones or friends to spend the night with I extend my love; you are in my thoughts tonight.

For my friends close and far, my colleagues at work and people I have worked with during this past year I love you all!

A Merry Christmas to you all!

And now I am off to celebrate with my family…

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

~ William Shakespeare

When you push yourself out of your comfort zone you often confront yourself with your resistance. It shouts at you and makes you doubt about your ability, your intelligence, your self.

The biggest fight for the learner it the fight with his inner self, the countless battles fought with resistance in order to step outside your comfort zone.

Your resistance is the devil on your shoulder telling you that you can never truly learn that hard new skill you want to acquire. It tells you that the hard work you are putting into learning does not matter. That the knowledge that is clamoring to leap out of you will always be restrained by social pressure, time, and the ringing words of all those who have laughed at your in the past.

Fight it, you are not alone, we all suffer this malady and we all fight everyday with it to get ourselves up on our feet yet again.

I have been asked a couple of times now why I teach at Makers Academy instead of making a lot of money with my skills.

I could write about many reasons that this is so; being part of an awesome team helps, but that is not the main reason.

Last friday, at the graduation, magic happened while having an inocent conversation with the mother of one of our graduates; a humbling moment; a compliment; an inspiring gesture.

There are many different reasons that make teaching a fullfilling calling, but that conversation trumped everything so far:

In 12 weeks you have achieved what I, as a mother, haven’t in a lifetime; thank you! ~ mom