2022 review

January 01, 2023 · 9 mins · 1751 words

Today I’m going to write about the most typical topic of the last days of the year: New Year’s resolutions. The usual schema for this post is to review one last year’s resolutions and write down the resolution for the starting year. However, I didn’t write any list for this ending year, so I’ll just do a quick summary of the year and write down the resolutions for 2023.

2022 summary

Contrary to what I’ve read in a lot of end-of-year posts in other blogs, this has been a great year for my family and me. I’m aware that the world is facing a lot of crises, and it seems we’re on the verge of an apocalypse, but I would be lying if I said that this year hasn’t been good for our family. Of course, not everything has been good, and we have faced some difficulties along the way, but I rate the year with an 8.5/10.

In January, Maria changed her job and career, moving from an administrative role to an HR/Talent Acquisition one. She wanted to work in HR for a long, and thanks to God she could change her position at the beginning of the year. The change has been super-positive, and the culture in the new company is amazingly better in comparison with her old company.

Also, we had the opportunity to make our first travel alone since Mateo was born. We spent a weekend in Andorra, visiting some friends and relaxing at Spa Caldea. It felt good to spend some quality time alone and have time to talk.

Then, in February, Inés left Sant Cugat to spend six months in Italy. We missed her, but a lot of videocalls happened during these months between Maria, Inés, and Mateo, and this helped us to feel closer to her.

Later that year, in March, our friends Michelle and Jorge got married in Puerto de Santa María. We spent a weekend there and we enjoyed the experience a lot. The first surprise was to meet an old friend of mine at the airport, who happened to be invited to the wedding as well. It was cool to have the opportunity to talk with him after a lot of years. Once at Puerto, we stayed in a hotel that the couple had reserved near the town’s center. All the people invited to the wedding were staying there, so it was cool to meet a lot of people. Also, almost 80% of the guests were young (less than 30), so it was a fun party. I have to confess that I drank a little bit more than usual, and I ended up talking with a Finnish guy about how it is to live near Russia 1.

In April, Maria prepared a surprise for me. We went together with another couple to spend a weekend in Zaragoza to see a show by Berto Romero, my favorite Spanish comedian. We were surprised by the festive atmosphere in Zaragoza at night since we were expecting a more boring night. We went all four out for some tapas and wine, and later Maria and I continued the celebration privately in our room. The consequences of this party night manifested themselves 9 months later, when Alejandra, our second daughter, was born on December 15. I will write more about pregnancy and birth in a few paragraphs. Finally, as we usually do on Easter we spend a weekend in a rented house near the beach, to celebrate the resurrection of Christ with our friends. Finally, later in April, Maria surprised me with a positive pregnancy test, the consequence of our trip to Zaragoza.

May was an interesting month. I started going to therapy for the first time in my life, and it helped me a LOT. Just for context, I suffered from anxiety for the last 2 years, and for some reason, I refused to go to therapy. I can’t stress enough how useful it was for me to talk with a professional about my problems. During the sessions, we discovered that my anxiety levels were off the chart (>90 percentile), that I was suffering from some depression, and that my ADHD score was over the average (6 out of 10) 2. I also participated in a night datathon from 11 pm to 4 am -0/10, don’t recommend, don’t do it again, even more so if you have to work the next day. This month I celebrated my first year without smoking (May 23).

June was a chill month even though we had a lot of plans. My favourite one was to participate in a rice contest in Sant Cugat. We had to prepare a traditional paella using a wood fire instead of a gas fire - I know how to cook with gas, but I’ve never tried using wood. I’m looking forward to repeating this experience again. I also participated in another datathon: the Aily Labs datathon. We had to build an ML model to classify images of eyes with glaucoma. I participated with a group of super-talented guys, and fortunately, we won the competition. The price was an Apple Watch, but I ended up giving it to my father. Finally, in June I started having conversations with the EAE to teach ML/DS classes in one of their masters.

July was a bad month. As parents, we experienced one of the worst nightmares I can imagine. One night Maria woke up with our bed covered with blood. She was in the first trimester of pregnancy, which is usually when more problems happen, so we headed up to the hospital waiting for the worst. Thanks to God, the baby was okay and the blood wasn’t from the placenta, it was from a hematoma that Maria had. Apparently, this is more or less normal, and the solution was that Maria had to rest for the following weeks.

Fortunately, in August we spent one week with Maria’s family, and they helped us a lot so that Maria could rest. As every year, these days in Asturias felt like being in paradise. We rested a lot, we had a lot of fun, and we ate a LOT 3. One of my favorite plans of those days was to attend a music festival in Santander where we had the opportunity to watch Guitarricadelafuente. After a week in Asturias, we moved to Cantabria to spend a week just the four of us.

In September we traveled to Sardinia to spend a week there. It was an amazing experience, but we had to stop doing many things since with Mateo it was impossible. Anyway, the place is incredibly beautiful, and we plan to visit the island again in some years. Right after coming back from Sardinia, Mateo started his adventure in kindergarten, and he has enjoyed almost all the days since then. The only drawback is that the number of infections that Mateo has experienced since the first day of school has increased exponentially. Finally, on the last weekend of September, I had a goodbye party for Laura and Joan, who left Barcelona to spend the following year(s) in Australia.

October was the month of weddings. Maria and Alvaro got married the first weekend, and Cristina and Saf the next one. We enjoyed a lot the weddings since both couples are lifelong friends. I enjoyed, in particular, Saf’s wedding because he is one of my best friends and he asked me to be one of his best men.

Then it came November, one of the calmest months of the year. The only remarkable thing I did was give a lightning talk at PyDay BCN 2022. Don’t get me wrong, I was super excited to present my work to a bunch of people, and it was the first time I participated in an event like this one. This was one of my steps to give a talk at a major conference at some point in the future. Also, at some point in November, the doctors noticed that Alejandra wasn’t growing fast enough, so we started doing weekly checks.

And finally December. We started it with Mateo’s birthday on the 1st of December. The same day I went to a Carolina Durante concert, and it was a-ma-zing. One of the best shows I’ve ever been to. I also taught 3 sessions of the Data Management subject in EAE’s master. At one of the doctor’s appointments, they noticed that the baby stopped growing at all, so they decided that the best option was to induce labor the following day, and so it was. On December 15 Alejandra was born!

Let me add also that I wrote a lot in my blog. It was one of my implicit resolutions for 2022, and I think I’ve fulfilled it with flying colors. After 22 posts, more than 23k visits from more than 17k users, and having appeared on the front page of HN three times, I’m more than happy with my efforts and results.

And this is everything for this year! Sometimes I have the feeling that my life is boring, but after going over the year and writing this summary I’ve noticed that my life is everything but boring.

2023 goals

  1. My English gets better when I drink a couple of beers. ↩

  2. 6 of my 8 siblings have some kind of ADHD, ASC, or dyslexia, so it wasn’t a surprise for me to share some of these characteristics with them. ↩

  3. Following the tradition of last year I gained 2kg during these days :) ↩