2023 review

2022

The year is fading day by day, and in a couple of weeks we will be in 2024, so the time to reflect about my year and resolutions has arrived. I’ll first do a review of the resolutions I set last year, then I’ll do a summary of 2023 (mainly addressed to my future self), and then set some resolutions for 2024.

Notice that this post is mainly addressed to me, my friends, and my family, so if you don’t know me you can skip it and read more interesting things unless you’re a stalker or my secret admirer.

2023 goals evaluation

• Fail. Spend 15 minutes a day praying.

I completely failed this goal. I started the year strong with a spiritual retreat and a lot of good intentions, but as usual, they faded away more or less fast. This year I’ll try it again, as St. Josemaría said spiritual life is a constant beginning and beginning again.

• Success. At least one post per month.

This year I’ve published 25 posts, which is more than 2 per month. Now I’m rereading some of them and I have mixed feelings about their quality. For the moment I won’t delete them, but I feel attracted to do so.

• Success. One post with more than 10k visits.

Surprisingly I beat this goal twice this year. The first time was with the post Nobody cares about your blog, and it was a surprise since it’s not about the usual topics I write about in this blog. I had mixed feelings about this since it meant that people enjoyed more a random post I wrote in less than one hour than the posts where I spent a couple of days. On the other hand, a lot of people reached out thanks to this post going viral, and this felt good.

The second post that hit the milestone was How far can you jump from a swing?. I enjoyed a lot writing this post since it forced me to relearn some physics concepts such as Lagrangians. The simulations part was also fun to do. I’m very happy and proud of the result.

• Fail. Write every day, at least 250 words.

I already discarded this goal on the 3rd of January since I quickly realized that doesn’t fit with me to force myself to write about any topic just to beat a mark.

• Fail. Build an end-to-end project with backend and frontend.

I started the year planning a simple game based on the counting license plates game. I wrote some documentation and designed the system, but I never wrote a line of code.

• Meh. Spend more time doing sports.

The success of this goal has varied over the years. At some points, I did some consistent sport (almost 2 times a week) and I managed to do 10 strict pull-ups. But since Maria started the master I haven’t had time to exercise. And it looks like it’ll be like this until April or May.

• Fail. Focus specifically on climbing. Be able to climb a 6b consistently, at least in the climbing gym.

If I’m not wrong this year I’ve climbed only once. So this is a complete failure. Without a climbing buddy, it seems impossible to go climbing consistently.

• Almost. One family excursion a month.

We had quite a lot of excursions, but I’m not sure if we hit the milestone of having at least one per month. We have gone to Tibidabo a couple of times (we’re now members of the family club), we went to the Barcelona Aquarium (it was cool to see the shark so close), we went a couple of times to a farm (Mateo enjoyed a lot touching the animals and feed them), and we also had a lot of excursions with Mateo and his bike. For the next year, however, I would like to do more “long” excursions, like going to visit a town far away or going to hike in the mountains.

• Success. Keep teaching ML/DS in some course/master/boot camp.

I gave 7 sessions of Python at EAE this year, and I’ll give 7 more sessions in May. I’ve learned some things about teaching, and now I feel more prepared to teach to big groups of people.

• Success. Learn something new.

I reluctantly give this goal a success but just because it’s impossible to not learn anything during a year. The true goal was to actively learn something by putting in some effort every week (like learning Rust or learning to do a handstand). I’ll write a more specific goal for 2024 that is not cheatable.

2023 summary

Here I write a summary of the year. While preparing this year review I enjoyed reading the one I wrote on 2022. So I’m writing this just for the Alex of 2024.

2023 has been a roller coaster of emotions. We started the year with Alejandra recently born, but since she was premature she had to stay at home a lot. As a consequence I spent the first weeks of the year in the park with Mateo, leaving space for Maria and Alejandra to rest. Then, after Christmas break, Mateo went back to kindergarten so I could spend more time taking care of Maria and Alejandra, but at the end of January, I had to go back to work at Stuart.

During the first Alejandra’s weeks, Maria noticed she had almost no strength and that she was developing slower than what we experienced with Mateo. However, our paediatrician told us that this could be explained because Alejandra was premature. Even with that Maria was not convinced.

Then, at the end of February, the first hit happened. One morning Alejandra woke up with a high fever and we rushed to the hospital. In the rush, we went to the wrong hospital ¹ but they received us anyway. Anyway, after a lot of blood analysis, the doctors discovered she had a severe urine infection that also infected the blood (which is known as sepsis). This can be very dangerous because, among other things, it can inflame the brain (meningitis) and produce neurological damage. Thanks to God, after a lumbar puncture the doctors confirmed she had no brain inflammation, and that the infection could be treated with antibiotics.

During our long stay at the hospital, the second hit came when one of the paediatricians noticed Alejandra’s small head, and suggested we go see the neonatologist to analyze her case. A couple of days later we met with the neonatologist and she explained to us that the case of Alejandra was not normal. She was developing extremely slowly, and her head was on the percentile <1%, which usually means that something wrong is happening. She sent us to a physiotherapist who specializes in babies and suggested we do a genetic test for Alejandra. We started the physiotherapy right away and we have had sessions weekly since then (thank you very much Berta for your help). While waiting for the results, we organized Alejandra’s baptism, and she got christened on May 6 by our priest friend Alex.

Then, after long weeks waiting for the genetic results we got a call from the hospital to tell us the results were ready. We met this same week -the 17th of May- with the neonatologist and the results weren’t the ones we were expecting. She explained to us Alejandra has an extremely rare condition known as “13q33-q34 microdeletion” which basically means that a piece of genetic information has been deleted. The most recent paper (2019) about the topic reports only 60 patients around the world with this pathology. As you can imagine when she explained it to us we felt terrible. This is not the kind of news you want to hear from a doctor, and we needed some weeks to process all the information. In my case, my professional deformation led me to read all the possible papers about the topic, and I even did some statistical simulations to predict the possible effects of this pathology on Alejandra. But since the number of cases is so small it doesn’t make sense to try to predict what is going to happen in the future, and all the doctors have recommended us to focus on the present and try to help Alejandra as much as possible now.

After this discovery came a series of visits to many medical specialists, to check everything was in order. We visited cardiologists, ophthalmologists, nephrologists, neurologists, pulmonologists, and some more. The “calming” part about this pathology is that it explains all the symptoms we noticed in Alejandra such as the small head, the slow intrauterine development which led us to force Alejandra’s birth, the problems with the kidneys that led to the urine infection, a small cardiological defect, and other things. Since then Alejandra has had a couple of bronchiolitis (she spent some weeks in the hospital again in July due to bronchiolitis) which can be also explained by this deletion.

The current situation is that Alejandra is not evolving as slowly as we expected. During my initial research, I discovered the rarechromo page, which helps people with rare chromosomic disorders. There I read some reports about people with defects similar to Alejandra’s who learned to crawl when they were 2 years old, but Alejandra learned when she was 11 months old. So, overall we’re a little bit more optimistic than a few months ago.

On the other hand, this has been a great year with Mateo. We started the year by going together every Monday to the swimming pool, and he learned to swim by himself using a pool noodle. He also started his second year of preschool, and even if the first weeks were tough for him now he’s enjoying a lot going there.

He also learned to ride a balance bicycle and we have spent a lot of time playing with it. Now he’s very fast with it, and we have to be careful that he doesn’t escape at the slightest opportunity.

This has been a year of changes for Maria. He started the year with a new kid, and as I’ve explained before a lot of things have happened during this year. On top of that, she has managed to get a promotion from Talent Recruiter to HR Business Partner. Now she’s the BP of the corporate team at Innovamat. If that wasn’t enough she started a master’s in People Analytics at EAE, and now she’s learning about data analysis, Python, SQL, PowerBI, etc. It’s truly amazing and encouraging see her to exceed the expectations in everything she does. She starts working in the office at 7.30 am, comes back home around 5 pm to have time to be with her kids, and two times a week she goes to classes from 7 pm to 10 pm. We both know that this rhythm can’t be sustained for a long time, but for the moment she’s managing to do everything, which is incredible.

On my side, I’ve also had some important changes. I left Stuart at the end of August to join Wallapop. Wallapop is the biggest second-hand marketplace in Spain, and it’s one of the most known brands here. I decided to leave for a couple of reasons, basically (1) after finishing the POETA project ² I felt that I couldn’t contribute more to Stuart, (2) the economic situation at Stuart wasn’t very clear, and (3) I got an offer from Wallapop, which is a company with which I am very aligned and with which I share many of my personal values.

Before joining Wallapop’s team I decided to take some days to disconnect, and I took the opportunity to do a couple of stages of the Camí de Ronda (a footpath along the Costa Brava coast). I enjoyed the experience of disconnecting and discovering remote beaches, but the second stage was very tough since we got the path wrong and we ended up having to climb some cliffs.

Now I’m working there in the Search team, and specifically I’m working on the ranking of items after the matching phase. I learned a lot about this topic - I didn’t even know that ranking is a type of ML model different from classification and regression - and I’m preparing a post about what I’ve been learning. The team here is amazing, and my DS peers are super cool and motivated to try new technologies and have an impact, so I’m enjoying a lot working here.

On the other hand, I kept teaching Python classes in a Data Analytics master, and I kept learning about how to do it better. A representative share of my students never programmed before taking my class, so I’m keeping things simple and trying to teach them the fundamentals. It’s interesting to see how frustrating can be to learn to code, and seeing them suffer brings back memories of when I started programming. I hope I can be a better teacher than the ones I had when I started. At some point, I would like to teach people with prior coding knowledge and focus more on interesting parts of ML, like how to train your first model, or how to deploy a model.

In another news order, this year I started laser hair removal, and I can finally empathize with the pain that millions of people feel every time they are forced to remove hair.

Family

Family wise it has been a tough year as well. My grandmother (Iaia Fina) passed away in January, and even though it wasn’t a surprise (she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last 10 years) it wasn’t nice to say goodbye. But being honest I’m happy she now rests in a better place near her husband, watching our family and taking care of us, as she always did.

Regarding siblings, there are two bittersweet stories. First, in January, my sister Martona left home to live in Canarias near her boyfriend. I’m happy for her and this new stage of her life, but it’s always sad to be far away from your sister. Another bittersweet story is Jordi’s one. He has been having some addiction problems for the last few years, and finally, he entered a therapeutic community in December. It’s bittersweet because we’ll miss him a lot this Christmas, but we’re also happy to see him want to improve and put aside what was hurting him. Now we need to keep praying for him to be strong in his decisions.

We also had very happy moments in the family. I especially enjoyed my mother’s anniversary celebration. We went to Tarragona to eat paella, and we spent all day on the beach. It had been a long time since we last met to do something special. I also lost a bet with Rafa, when I told him he was unable to win a Fortnite game and betted a Burger King meal against him. Against all odds and for the first time in his life he won the next game and I was forced to take him to eat at BK.

On Maria’s family’s side, we also had an important moment. Manolo presented his thesis in October at Alcala’s University. We went there without the kids to watch his doctoral defense and spend a couple of days days in Alcala and Madrid. We also spent, as usual, some weeks in Asturias with Maria’s family. Every year I go there I fall more in love with that place. If it only were a little bit closer to Catalunya… During the summer we had the great idea of buying two disposable cameras and printing the photos after the summer. I’ve never printed photos I’ve taken with my phone, so having this set of photos printed is something I appreciate a lot. The photos are far from perfect, but this is part of what I like about them.

Friends

This has been a nice year for our friends as well. A lot of them got married: Elena & Ignasi (10 March), Helena & Diego (22 April), Itziar & Miki (19 May), Marta & Lucas (7 July). It was nice to enjoy their special day near to them, and to be honest, I cried a lot at each of the weddings. With this round of weddings, there’s only one member of our group who’s not married (no pressure Iñaki).

Also, our group of friends is expanding via new generations. Almu gave birth to Iñigo in October, and Anna and Marta are both pregnant and waiting for Tomás and Santiago respectively. It warms my heart to see my friends growing and making their families bigger. I’m truly fortunate to have them near me.

One of the best gifts I got from a friend was two tickets for Festival B from Xavi. We saw several of our favourites bands (Carolina Durante, Cariño, and Depresión Sonora) and we danced a lot. Once again, Xavi demonstrated he’s one of the best making gifts.

2024 goals

This year I’ll reduce the list of goals and focus on less goals.

• Pray everyday. The goal is to expand my spiritual life, not just tick off a list of resolutions. Focus on that and forget about the “rules”.
• One family excursion a month. This year I don’t think I’ll be able to do a lot of sport, at least until April or so when Maria finishes her master, so instead of doing sport alone I’ll try to have longer excursions/walks/hikes with my wife and kids.
• Optimise family finances. We currently have some money invested, but we lack a plan. If at some point we get some extra money we don’t know what to do with it (invest it, save it, spend it?). The goal is to develop a clear plan that helps us to know what to do with our money at any point. To do so it’s a good idea to talk with a financial planner.
• Teach Machine Learning. These last years I’ve been teaching basic Python, but this year I want to start teaching advanced topic like ML. I can do it via tutoring an intern or by starting a side project where I teach ML classes.