Year in review 2020

2020 has been an intense rollercoaster of a year, with extreme ups and downs - probably more downs than ups for most of us. I will focus on the good stuff in this post, but let’s get one thing straight first:

There is nothing good about the f*** pandemic

It wasn’t an opportunity to do anything. There is no bright side for this situation. If it somehow hasn’t affected your life, good for you, just be respectful of the ones who haven’t had the same luck.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’d like to use the first “year in review” post of this blog to celebrate wins and to discuss the challenges and lessons I learnt in the last year. Let’s do it!

A new and exciting challenge

The biggest win has been in my career. I’ve left my position in TransferWise to take the challenge of building something from scratch: I am now CTO of Broad, a fintech that will be the first oversees neobank for latin americans. This is actually the reason why I haven’t been writing since September - the new challenge keeps me busy!

And obviously, Broad is powered by Scala and ZIO

Giving back to the community

In 2020 I had the opportunity to speak at some conferences outside the UK, among them Lambda Days in Kraków (the only one in person, pre-pandemic), Scala UA in Kyiv and Codemotion in Amsterdan. You can find all the videos and slides for my talks available here.

Another highlight is my participation in the podcast Hipsters ponto Tech the largest (and my favorite) podcast about technology in Brazil.

Codewise, according to GitHub Wrapped I made 251 commits and 78 pull requests in 2020. I am just assuming, but these contributions were mostly to quill and pi2schema.

The Blogging Journey

I started the year with my one and only post about Rust, wrote about Lambda Days in February, but only by the end of March I started blogging consistently, until the end of June. Here are my website stats at the end of 2020:

• 15k pageviews
• 7.3k unique visitors
• 84% bounce rate

A few insights:

• my best month was July, with 1482 visitors
• my worst month was March, with 119 visitors
• my top three countries visiting were United States, UK and Germany
• my top three most visited blog posts were:
  • Streaming all the way with ZIO, Doobie, Quill, http4s, fs2
  • ZIO + Http4s: a simple API client
  • Rust: Deserialize JSON with Serde

I’ve learnt so much from the ZIO community, that’s not a surprise most of the content is related to it. I’d like to express my love for such an awesome community, always welcoming and eager to help!

#ScalaThankYou ZIO community!

What I expect from 2021

I’m really hoping that 2021 will be drastically better. I want to go home and see my family and friends in Brazil, and be able to hug every single one of them. God, miss hugging my friends. With the vaccination happening (it already started in the UK), I feel positive about it.

In the meantime I will work - and study - a lot. The first quarter of 2021 will be probably the busiest of my life, and the most exciting as well. Many interesting things are already happening and I feel like this experience will change me for good. I will tell you more about it as soon as I can!

I hope you enjoyed my recap! Have a great 2021!

And damn you 2020!