Last updated December 17, 2024 from cozy Bogotá 🇨🇴

What's happening in my life right about now. You can see previous updates here.

Big changes

First, we came back from Chicago at the end of October. We missed the snow (which seems for the best, thermal sensation was at -22 Centigrade last week.)

Second, I am no longer working for R5. The last 2 years were a highlight in my professional life, particularly the work we did on our R5 App. It is now the largest vehicle App in the country, with ~250K monthly active users and almost a million total installs. Extremely proud of what we built together with Ricardo, Alejandro, Andrea and the rest of the team.

Third, I am starting a new adventure. I am building a new kind of educational institution in Colombia 🎓. More on that soon!

Happiness Meter 🤩

9/10. Leaving R5 left me teary-eyed when saying goodbye, but overall I’m excited for the road ahead. Also, Christmas is the best time of the year in Colombia. So many buñuelos 😋

Family 💛

Coming back to Colombia didn’t feel sad at all. It somehow felt as if we were just on a long vacation trip, and just came back home. Natalia had major breakthroughs in her road towards improving her English, and I’m so proud of her ❤️

Franco and Luca are now brighter than ever. They are now voracious for learning (and wrestling!). We have a new routine of “researching” a topic or 2 together every night before sleeping, instead of reading the same books over and over. So they ask for one topic each, we read parts of a Wikipedia article on it, and watch a short video on the subject. Franco is now obsessed with Airplanes (he sleeps with one by his side ✈️) and Luca is into learning in general. Recently, he really wants to learn about war machines (trucks, tanks, planes, ships, you name it).

We are also very much into the holiday spirit ⬇️

Learning 📚

Not much happens in Colombia work-wise during the holidays, and given my exit from R5 I decided to take some time to learn Rust 🦀. It was very hard to decide between Rust and Golang, but I think Rust will be more challenging and open up my mind to new paradigms a bit more.

Entrepreneurship 🚀

I’m in the “problem exploration” phase of building of my new adventure. I’ve been speaking with the top minds in education in Colombia to understand more on what needs to be done. I have been amazed at the generosity of everyone in the education sector: they have provided me with invaluable insights and connections.

I will write out a post on the idea soonish.