2020 in review

The year 2020 was a very challenging year for the majority of us. Humanity saw a pandemic that was unthinkable to all of us (except to Bill Gates).

We saw our lives, routines, and even dogmas being completely questioned when:

• we were all forced to work from home;
• we saw the EU countries’ borders being active again (suspending the Schengen agreement);
• we couldn’t / shouldn’t visit our relatives;
• we experiment with curfews and several other restrictions that even got people racing into a shopping spree for basic hygiene items and groceries;
• we saw people being infected (and dying) at an alarming pace;
• we saw millions losing their jobs… while others got even richer;
• we saw top companies losing their evaluation in a handful of weeks (examples here and here);
• we saw gaming consoles bringing the worst in people.

So I think it is fair to say that, from a humanity perspective, 2020 was a terrible year… that I hope it was the worst year of our lifetime… that didn’t get even worse because we (humans) achieved a few promising vaccines that are promising to tame this devastating pandemic.

But, and there is always a but, we also have our very own perspectives of how the year went, and I need to confess that at the individual, maybe even selfish, perspective my year of 2020 was quite good (even having in mind that I also suffered from the bullets mentioned above).

This year of 2020 I saw the following happening in my life:

• I changed jobs when I decided to leave Talkdesk to join Salsify;
• I moved from Porto to Lisbon;
• I traveled for the first time to the US to visit Salsify’s HQ, in Boston;
• I met inspiring people to work with and an amazing company’s culture;
• I was brought on a mission to help brands with on the digital shelf;
• I got invited to co-organize the community CTOs Portugal;
• I took a leadership course with TLC;
• I took two online courses about becoming an entrepreneur and about leading remote teams;
• I’m leading a fantastic group of engineers distributed across the US, EMEA, and APAC;
• I was invited to speak at 10 events (e.g., conferences, meetups, podcasts, universities) on subjects like management, leadership, agile, and on-call;
• I’ve guided two handfuls of people regarding several subjects like career, hiring, software engineering, and industry trends.

So yes, when I think about 2020 I have very mixed feelings regarding how it was and how I lived it. I guess if you look at the glass half-empty you can say it was a bad year but if you look at the glass half-full you can say it was actually pretty good.

With this review, I’m closing the very busy, challenging, and tiring year 2020 and I can say that I’m looking forward to entering 2021 hoping that it will be a better year for humankind and for each one of us.

Happy 2021 and may the force be with you… always! 🙂