Journal

Gaps between wrapping the gifts at my parents' house before Christmas dinner are always a great time to think about the closing year.

Overall, 2023 felt slow, but after reviewing Google Photos, it could be because it started intense, and the last half has been more stable. Some highlights below, but one of the most significant changes has been almost leaving social networks. Elon Musk's landing at Twitter and Reddit CEO disaster made me ditch my main time suckers in a glimpse. I haven't missed them a single minute, and it has improved my mental health a bit. At the start of the year, I would do the same with Instagram, where I mostly flex and lose a lot of time, amazed by its cringe.

Here are some highlights from this year in pictures. I wanted to keep it at one image per month but had to add some extras.


January - Monkey Sanctuary at the Amazon (Peru) before my friends Iker and Luzma's wedding.


February - The Spanish Basketball Cup in Badalona.



March - Moved to a new apartment close to the sea and Barcelona.



March - Alizzz concert brought the craziest night of the year.



April - Yearly sagardotegi with friends.



May - Tinybird company retreat in Lanzarote.



May - I rented a small patch of land to harvest my own veggies.



June - Music festival season: Afterlife (pic), Primavera Sound, and Sonar.



June - Trip to Riga (Latvia).



July - First barbacue at the new house.



August - Met my favourite person of the year.



September - Trip to Cuba.



October - Started playing D&D again.



October - Some days off to visit Portaventura Halloween and Delta of Ebro.



November - I didn't run the marathon, but I beat this year my longest distance running PR.



December - Visit to Valencia and the Albufera.

I have made some progress on three things that would happen during the current year that I'm really excited about:

• 🧑‍🌾 I'm renting a 200-square-meter vegetable patch not far from home. I've spent the last few weeks watching YouTube agriculture videos and researching tools.


• 📚 I'm also starting a Data Engineer Camp in a couple of weeks. I have been learning on my own since I joined Tinybird, but I found a course with a modern curriculum, including dbt, ClickHouse, Snowflake, etc., with great teachers.


• 🏃 I'm running the Valencia Marathon this year. Two hundred days to get ready and try to finish.

The year started traveling to Peru for a wedding and some exploration. Almost three weeks while the country was experiencing intense riots that closed most of the main touristic areas. But how amazing is a country where if you cannot go to Machu Pichu, you can spend almost a week in the middle of the Amazon jungle or the Andes?


Not long after returning, I moved out of Barcelona center to a small apartment in front of the sea, 20 minutes by train from Barcelona. I lost the crazy amount of shopping and restaurants in a 15-minute radius (I will miss you, Italian Cheese store), but I took my first wing foil class today. I'm trying to live more frugally: spend less, go to fewer restaurants, and not have the pressure to spend every single public holiday in a new country. Nature makes it way easier?

I have spent the last two weeks of 2022 working from Lanzarote. Working eight hours from a sunny garden full of local cacti and then walking or driving around the island the Fiat 500e we rented.

Driving an electric car has been one of the highlights of the last couple of weeks. I loved it. Being able to drive with almost zero noise from the engine through a beautiful island full of sounds and volcanic rock feels different. Battery drains if you drive on +100kph roads, forcing you to plan your trip from one charger to the next. But driving it on an island with 70-90 kph roads makes the experience ❤️.



Today is the last day of the year. 2022 has been demanding but rewarding. The beginning of the year was quite stressful, with more than ten meetings per day between Europe and the West Coast. I changed roles mid-year from Senior Design Manager to Product Manager and companies from the +3,000 employees at New Relic to the 50 at Tinybird. My productivity stayed high, but I achieved a better work & life balance, and I got to finish the Javascript Full-Stack Bootcamp I started at the beginning of the year and code weekly for the last half of the year.
After two? years of pandemic, I also got back into the habit of discovering new places like Svalbard, Andorra, Boston, Amsterdam, and Sofia, also visiting some of my favorite already visited places like London, Lanzarote, New York, and Madrid.

I only have a few goals for 2023, or at least fewer than last year. Read more books and fewer newsletters, run more constantly and not only during race season, make at least a release of log.travel, and walk each day at least 10,000 steps (2022 has been brutal working from home).

Happy New Year!

It took me more than a week to create a working but not super-performant Like button like the one below. I had to learn how SWR worked and a bit more about how Next.13 deals with APIs and routing.


A ton of things have happened since the last entry two weeks ago:

- I visited London to attend Modern Frontends Live! That I guess that after all the complaints will never happen again. But it was a great trip as I could visit my brother and walk around Shoreditch and Limehouse, where I used to live a couple of years ago and missed a bit (even if I didn't get to buy any new CDs at Rough Trade).


- There was a new reorganization at work with a more precise mission and a bigger team. Also, we kicked off a super exciting project around iterating with data that I have been defining for the last month.

- I have been trying Execute Program for the last couple of weeks to improve my SQL skills (I subscribed yesterday using their great Black Friday discount). After working quite a bit with DBs like Postgres or ClickHouse, I have to say SQLite has some interesting design decisions behind it.

- This is my last weekend at home for the next eight weeks. Next: Bulgaria, Madrid, Lanzarote, and Perú.

Yesterday I tried the Call of Duty API wrapper. I bought the other day the new Modern Warfare 2, and I wanted to see what was available out there to create a small widget or analyze what could be the best loadout.
There are several wrappers that reverse engineer the API they used on the official page, so not perfect, but enough to play a bit.

The bad news is that MW2 is not available yet in the API endpoint.But I was able to get some of my horrible stats playing Warzone, like my 0.865 Kill / Death Ratio on 806 games.There are several endpoints with different data. For example, this is the response of the fullData endpoint in case you are interested.

Probably I’ ll wait until MW2 is available to start backing up my data in Tinybird. Meanwhile, I will think about what I could do with it: weekly averages, friends' rankings, or check the more performant weapons.

During the last couple of months, I have bought some surprisingly expensive things in average places here in Barcelona.
It may be a trend of living in a highly touristic place where tourist traps are expected, or it might be related to inequality and people with huge acquisition power residing in countries with lower wages.

Yesterday I paid 11.5 euros for a bread loaf. It was indeed a 1.2 kilograms loaf, but it was surprising when the rest of the bread at the store was priced between 1.5 and 4 euros.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a 13 euros beer can. They explained that it was expensive because they brought it from Portland. I bought it because I thought it should be one of those fantastic west coat craft IPAs I miss a lot. But, never mind.

And during summer I spent +20 euros on a small cherry basket. I later discovered it was because we were not in season, and this was a unique seed of cherries that could grow out of season. They could have tasted better for the price."

I forgot to mention that I spent some time working on a command line prototype this week. It didn't feel so refreshing to design something for a long time.
I used click (plus tqdm for the loaders), which we use at Tinybird for the real thing, but it is also really easy to use it to fake some interactive commands.

September was vacation month, and then time to keep track of everything stopped during those 11 days. First time in Boston and one more visit to NYC that always has a ton of new things to check. We got the chance to watch Aerosmith's 50th-anniversary concert at Fenway Park, Hugh Jackman playing a musical, and hang out with a bunch of friends. I would have nightmares for a while about the price of hotels in Boston, but they were some perfect days to disconnect after a weird year so far.

I also spent some time working on this site while learning React/Next.js. I'm working on a Photos section using S3 + Prisma + Planetscale. Probably a bit overkill for my needs, but I wanted to play with S3 buckets.

This brings me to work. We worked hard at the beginning of the month to build a web analytics product on top of Tinybird. The first use case we productize. I wrote a thread in Twitter explaining it a bit.

I spent some time this weekend moving away from the default Next.js style. Nothing fancy, but I got a license for two styles of GT Super that I think look great with Inter. I also switched to getStaticProps and got the code in better shape.

Spending a weekend walking solo in a new city is one of the activities that makes me better disconnect from the day-to-day.
Fly the Thursday night. Work from the hotel on Friday. Spend the weekend walking and exploring. Come back home Sunday night (at least if this flight stops getting rescheduled).

As I recently changed jobs and was not going to take a break during July and August, I decided to make a short trip to Amsterdam. Probably the place on the top of my list of "how the fuck I haven't been there yet?".

Every time I travel to a northern Europe city, I always ask myself how it compares to Spanish towns. Every time I do, I feel that in Spain, people have to make an extra effort to create cities designed to be utterly dull and make them unique. Not a cute random sandwich place run by an old couple in the middle of nowhere. Not a scrapyard with some sketchy decorations and big tables to have a drink with friends while listening to some music. Not that old warehouse where startups could create their space and artist could do their thing (NSDM). Not that old dentistry school building transformed into a place with the classic European mix of food, drinks, and hard-techno parties (Raidon).
That's more uncommon in Spain. Poblenou and other neighborhoods might have some interesting spots here and there, but it looks like we have a rush to make our cities denser and less forgiving. No chance I could open a small taco bar with some electronic music in the corner of the three chimes old-factory in Barcelona.

Some random notes about these three days in Amsterdam:

• - I feel that nowadays, there are more weed clubs in Barcelona than coffee shops in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, they are more visible and accessible doh.
• - It's 2022, but some places in Amsterdam have problems with Visa and Mastercard. Credit cards are not popular in the country, but Visa Debit doesn't work either. I'm not talking only about small establishments. The most popular supermarket chain in the city, Albert Heijn, doesn't accept them, so you get 20 auto-pay terminals empty and a long queue for the only cashier. First time after many years, I heard someone mentioning Maestro.
• - Too many bikes are abandoned on the streets. I was surprised that there were almost only two types of bikes. Or you have an old comfort/city bike or a Bird/Vanmoof electric one.
• - Vegetarian food was terrific. I always asked if veg restaurants flagging themselves as vegan/vegetarian was not backfiring them. I'm sure many of my non-vegetarian would love some of the places where I have lunch, but seeing "vegetarian" will make them skip it. This was the first time I found a place to test my hypothesis, Madre. I had to check online to know if it was only veg. I have some great Birria Tacos, by the way.
• - Sometimes I think that fake meat brings an inevitable change in food consumption patterns, which is quite visible in some cities like Amsterdam or Barcelona. I had dinner at a vegetarian burger place in a very touristic street that was full while the steakhouse in front of it was empty (observer bias, I know).

This is a longer update than expected, but the flight was delayed 2 hours, so I had plenty of time.

Hello World!