It’s probably a bit too late to be making a 2022 recap, we are almost at the end of January, and when I post this there’s a chance it’s already February, but better late than never… So, without further ado let’s dive into what happened in 2022.

Last year⌗

Looking back, a lot of different things happened last year, some better than others, but it was a year where I grew considerably (professionally of course, I’m past the growth in height phase at this point 😂).

Several things accounted for this improvement, and the projects I worked on at Finiam, during the year, were certainly a big reason for that. But why?

  • Dissrup: The team had been working on Dissrup for some time now (approximately May 2021), and at the beginning of the year there was still a lot to do. We were a dev team of 3, working alongside Dissrup’s Designers and Managers. Looking back, NFTs may now seem like a fad, but the project had a lot of moving parts, including Backend, Frontend and Blockchain infrastructure, CDNs, CMSs, etc. We had to always be on our toes, keeping up with the development of new features and a healthy service. We worked on it until May when we handed it off to their “new” dev team. Sadly, a few months later, the project didn’t make it through the crypto winter, and it’s now on hold from their side. Overall I still feel proud of what we did there.
  • Utrust: I don’t think I can talk much about what we did there, but we worked with them from May up until this month (January). For me it was another different experience, working with new people and new methods. One of the biggest highlights of this time there was the ability to get back to writing some production code in Elixir (Dissrup was NodeJS).

In April, we also participated in ETHAmsterdam, and our hackathon project was one of the finalists. Detris, is a playable NFT that serves as an interface to play Tetris. What does that mean? It means that the NFT can run an instance of a game of Tetris. The asset the Detris NFT is retrieving is actually our implementation of the game. We use an iframe to display it wherever we want. And since OpenSea supports iframe too, we can actually play Tetris on OpenSea. We ended up winning a monetary prize per team member, and got the chance to present it on stage, in front of hundreds of others participants! It was a really cool experience. (Check this blogpost by Davide to know more in detail.)

On a more personal level, I wrote two blog posts 1, I gave a talk at JOIN, hosted by CeSIUM, and also got invited to talk about the same project at a Neo4j live stream. Me and Resende (also from Finiam) gave a Workshop on Software Testing with Elixir and Phoenix, as part of the CeSIUM Summercamp. (Check the Projects tab for more information on all of these).

What are my plans for this year⌗

My goal for this year is to be a bit more active and share more things and learnings with the outside world. This way, I’m trying to follow this Publishing your work increases your luck advice more closely. If you haven’t read it already, you should take the time to. This past year, I experienced what’s described there, and had several people, on different occasions, asking me for more information about something I shared, or just saying that they thought it was cool.

For every snarky comment, there are 10X as many people admiring your work.

I guess that I’m starting the year on the right path. I recently built my website, finally (it was in the plans for almost 2 years).

On another level, I plan to start at least a new personal project, but when the time comes, I’ll talk about it.

And last but not least, I had the idea to start a new segment called 8bit-sized Posts.

8bit is 1 byte meme

The goal is to have small blog posts, “byte-sized”, where I lay out tips and tricks, cool Today I Learned (TIL) findings, etc. To be honest, I still don’t know when I’ll start doing them, and how many I will do throughout the year. There’s a probability that this won’t happen at all, but the idea is already here. Who knows I’ll even inspire you (reading this), to start doing something similar. If you do, please hit me up at one of my socials (I’d like to read them).

Well, I guess this is it… Let’s see what 2023 holds, and see you in the next one 👋

  1. First and Second ↩︎