Well here we are again. It’s always such a pleasure. Remember when you tried to kill me twice?
I imagine somewhere deep down in my mind there is some kind of blogging GLaDOS. One that awakes from time to time and believes it’s time to put me back into the blogging chamber. 2 years ago I was told it was time again. But it didn’t last long. Well, I’m back again at it, with a text editor in my hands and perhaps a different will to do it.
Things changed in the past 2 years. A lot. I am no longer in Finland, but I am not in Portugal as well. I may not have finished my master’s, but I accomplished something which I already had given up on: working at CERN. Yes, you read that right: CERN. Which means I’m now working in Switzerland (and living in France).
But other things did not change at all. The goal of this blog is one of them. I’ll still write whenever I want and about whatever I want. And what I told you about why you should read it remains more or less the same. I am still not that good looking, for sure not an expert in the fields I’m working. I’m still funny and still manage to make people laugh with my sarcasm. Perhaps the only thing that changed in all of that was how interesting my life is, but that’s more because of where I work than myself. So, it’s still up to you to find a reason why you should read all of this crap.
So, what happened in the past 2 years? Finland wasn’t that great (but you could assume that by now). Coming back was even worse. Let’s just say that bureaucracy creates such big road blocks on your path that sometimes you no longer have the will to overcome them. It wasn’t, for sure, the best of times. But in the middle of all of that, two other opportunities appeared. Both of them involving leaving it behind and start fresh. I ended up here, working for CERN, but I could have ended up in Poland, working for Cisco. Not to shabby, I would say. And it’s been close to one year already since I moved again and started working at CERN and I couldn’t be happier. I finally found the balance I needed.
Moving here, being surrounded by the amazing scenery of the Alps and the Jura, also helped me going back to one of my passions: cycling. Well, not only the scenery but also with the help of some of my colleagues. Colleagues that over the time have become friends. I finally bought a road bike (having a Swiss salary is very helpful in these things). I did many kilometres with it. I did my first big climb, my first small group rides. I’m even taking part in a bike race next month! I was never a strong cyclist, and I may as well never become one, but I truly rediscovered the feeling of being out there, you and the machine, cruising through nature and man made places (just don’t pretend you’re a tram, trust me).
At the same time, my true passion in computer science, distributed systems, was left somewhere behind in the past and its space is being occupied by my work in business intelligence. Thank some kind of computing higher entity it’s not on the analysis side but on the development of the entire system that enables it. This also meant that, for some months, developing took the back seat. It made me find out how much I truly love it. In all of its quirks. How much I truly love seeing the machine failing to do what I want, spending hours figuring it out and the great sense of satisfaction that is getting it working. I also miss the simplicity of dealing with machines and not human beings. Turns out, it’s easier to make computers do things together than keeping a human being satisfied with what you provide. But I’m finding a balance between both programming and BI, by continuing to do what is needed but trying to take part into other projects and create my own.
In the mean time, and because this blog has 3 main themes (myself, programming and science fiction), I finally finished Star Trek: The Next Generation. And Star Trek: Voyager. And Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I am failing myself as a trekkie by not having watched the original series, but I tried. And I’ll keep trying, but it is a grind to actually watch it. It reminds me of how hard it is to go from level 55 to level 60 in Star Trek Online.
Gaming has also taken a big part of my life in this past year. I finally built a gaming desktop, which means I was able to start going through my backlog in Steam. It also meant I could start taking it more seriously. I founded a team, together with @0xJoao, called Peixinhos. It all started as a joke, a psychological trick to make our adversaries think we were any good. But as we recruited more people, things started to become a bit more serious. We even took part in an online Rocket League competition. But our main game is CS:GO, and we actually started taking it seriously. Playing with strategies, watching pro matches (I’m even going to ESL:One Cologne this year!), trying to actually improve and not just play for fun. It’s hard, but it’s also a good way to leave work at work and keep contact with my friends back home.
And this is basically what happened in the past 2 years. My life completely changed (for the better, I think). I still wouldn’t call it interesting, but hundreds of people seem to think otherwise. But this is already a long post, no more talking about the past. When I started (can I even say started?) this blog 2 years ago, I finished my first post with what I did that day and on the previous day. It seems fitting that I do the same for this second life.
So, I had pizza for lunch today (ok, maybe I need to improve a bit my eating habits, they seem to have gotten worse) and before I killed myself doing a FTP test on my “new” trainer (for those of you who don’t know, the FTP is a measure of your average Watts during an hour of cycling at your limit, not a test of the file transfer protocol) and yesterday I didn’t go to friday beers with my colleagues (I’ve missed all of them in 2017, either by being sick or having other things to do, also need to work on this).
And that’s it. I’m back into this and I hope that I have a lot more to tell you about than before, and that I’ll actually do it.
PS: About the second part of “Can you hear me now?”, I did not forget about it. For a long time, it was on the todo list and when I actually tried to build the decoder, JFugue’s API was completely rewritten and it was no longer compatible with all of the work done before. They also removed the documentation for the previous version (what a great idea…), making it very hard for me to do it and, as such, not worth the effort.
Afonso Garcia 