path: root/content/2020.md

Title: Review of 2020
Date: 2021-05-16
Category:
Tags:
Slug: 2020
Lang: en
Summary:
    The review of our year 2020 at ElenQ Technology.

It's been a while since the previous post here, and it's not because I don't
have anything to talk about. I've been working on many things since the
previous one.

I wanted to write specifically about something I'm doing these days, but that's
difficult to contextualize if there's a full year gap in the middle. So I
decided to talk about the 2020 and make a short review about what we did so we
can look forward and see what can we build from this.

#### 2020 at ElenQ Technology

2020 have been harsh for everyone, including ElenQ Technology. We started the
year with a lot of energy and we were pretty busy with courses here and there.
But then the pandemic came and all the in-person training stopped so we lost
our main income source, which is also one of the works I personally enjoy the
most.

So, after finishing our course on *Modern C++* in July (we'll talk about that
in a future post), right after we were freed from the lockdown here, everything
stopped. No more in-person courses, no more clients, nothing.

We knew that the pandemic was affecting the economy so we were well aware that
there were few chances to get clients in the rest of the year. Thankfully, we
had some work to do: [ElenQ Publishing](https://publishing.elenq.tech/en/).

We spent the summer and part of the autumn preparing the books, the printing
and making the paperwork as well as the tools we needed for the website and
future books. By November 13 we already had every book shipped and the
website was almost ready. At the beginning of December, the website was
finished and published.

It was more work than we expected but now we have a complete set of tools for
future publications, that can cover any of the points of the process with
almost no human interaction. We automated almost everything, and those things
we didn't automate are simple things once you know how to make them.

Of course, as engineers, we only consider automating things that we are going
to repeat so you can think about all this work as a plan to keep publishing new
material in the future.

It's really interesting to mention that our whole process is reproducible as we
are using [Guix](https://guix.gnu.org) as a tool, so no matter what happens we
could still go back in time and remake the books exactly as they were when we
published them.

As you see, at a company level, most of our work of 2020 was focused on
teaching and making the books (another form of teaching), because it's
something I personally enjoy a lot and I'd say it's more fulfilling than
anything else I've done. But it was sadly affected by the pandemic, so we need
to reorganize a little bit our strategy.

#### Personal level

Of course, I spend time on other things too. A great part of my job is to
randomly research anything I find interesting, so I can keep my mind fresh for
the possible projects that may come. This gives me tools and ideas, and also
lets me learn from other people.

During the year I spent some time contributing to Guix, for [reasons I already
discussed here](https://ekaitz.elenq.tech/donations-guix-01.html).  The most
notable contributions were the addition of a really interesting package that
was missing: Meshlab; and the correction of a package that was failing to
compile for months: FreeCAD.

Being locked at home, I also had the chance to go back to electronics, which
are a huge part of what I studied at university, but I never had the chance to
work on that in a professional level. I even designed some PCBs, produced
and soldered them with the highest level of quality possible. It was a great
experience.

On the other hand, I also needed some time to relax and try to recover from
some longstanding health issues I've been dealing with, that also deteriorated
because of the pandemic.

After some time practicing yoga and taking care of my body, I feel much better
in general, even if my issues are still there, at least they are not aggravated
by the bad posture and the physical stress that working in a computer can
provoke. So, if you are open to a suggestion: stretch, make some strength
exercises and try to keep your body on shape, specially if you work in an
office or any other kind of sedentary work that makes use of repetitive
movements like using a mouse or typing in a keyboard.

##### December

As I mentioned, our work with ElenQ Publishing was done at the beginning of
December. We approached that as a chance to stop and think.

During the last three years I had few chances to focus on an specific subject
for a long time, I had to quickly jump from one thing to another, in order to
be able to reach all the projects we had.

I was frustrated because of that. I'm easily distracted and it's hard for me to
pay attention for a while to the same thing but I really like to understand
things **deeply**, those who know me or that attended to my courses know it,
and my everyday life, full of stress and various stimulus, was making me unable
to concentrate.

I had moments of attention and clearness of mind during  the pandemic (and due
to the pandemic) that made me feel in peace so I wanted to feel that kind of
frustration-less live on purpose, not only when things come like that.

So that's what I did. I just needed something to investigate, something I was
interested since the early beginning of my career: programming languages.

I collected some books on compiler implementation and started reading them,
then I realized I was interested on operating system implementation so I read
about that too. Both things need to run somewhere so I also spent some time
digging on various architectures and their instruction sets, and so on.

I started developing a simple [Scheme
implementation](https://github.com/ekaitz-zarraga/blas) (only started, not
finished or anything) that served as an excuse to have a goal in mind in the
process. Also, I decided to [live stream](https://twitch.tv/ekaitzza) my
research process so I could share my findings with others and let them provide
me some thoughts and help me go slowly, paying attention to the interesting
details.

And let me tell you compiler implementation is often a difficult subject for
me, specially the theory, because my background is lacking some of the concepts
that Computer Science students have but I have to study from scratch[^note].

Having the chance to tackle a difficult long term task helped me forget and not
worry about the *bad* year we had as a company, in which we only had actual
paid work during the first half of the year.  I was just grateful to be able to
sustain myself enough time to have the chance to breathe and spend more time
with myself, doing something I don't always have the chance to do, regardless
of everything we, individually and collectively, were going through.

I hope you had some moments of relief too.


##### What I learned

I obviously learned many things during the year (books have been read!) But I
don't want to focus on that.

Sometimes the most important thing is not the goal, but the process. You learn
more from the travel than from the arrival, right?

I like to think that I learned to care more about myself in 2020. I'm still
sick, and my recovery got stuck as I was literally stuck at home, but that's
just a temporary issue, because I'm taking care of myself. Maybe not everyday,
but almost everyday I take care of myself. That's what counts.

2020 taught me how to make a publishing house. That's some important piece of
knowledge, but I consider more valuable to reclaim my time and my attention.
That taught me an important lesson by itself and it also served me to learn
about myself.

I learned that I was feeling alone in my interests. I had no one to share my
interests with. I know it is surprising to you, but basically nobody is
interested on how do garbage collectors, processors or anything like that work.
Most of the people don't even care about what they are. Crazy huh?

Sharing my findings, my research and my errors with other people makes me feel
better. I feel someone is there, on the other side. It helps me avoid
the frustration and the lack of motivation I have been feeling during the last
years.

The streaming helped with that[^english]: I had people reacting instantly, some
sent me papers to read, ideas, and others proposed me interesting things to do.
That feels good. It helped me remember that I'm not alone.

If 2020 had taught me anything is that I, or we, need others to feel better.
We need to take care of people[^people], because life is much better with them.

On top of many things, being conscious that I was researching **deep** opened
the door to apply that deepness in my everyday life more often. Not that I
wasn't doing that before, those who know me are aware that I'm kind of an
intense guy, but that I'm more conscious about it and I can selectively choose
to go deeper about my thoughts and feelings.

This time for myself remind me how intense I was back then and how I enjoyed
being a dedicated person.



#### So what

As I said, in a company level I decided to use that time to arrange a new
strategy. I wouldn't say I changed it that much, because I was in peace when it
was developed, almost 4 years ago, but it let me rethink it taking in account
my professional and personal experience in the recent years.

Collaborating on free software projects has shown me that I feel comfortable
with larger codebases and more complex concepts that were too much for me in
the past. Now I feel more confident about that.

Of course, this came with practice and time, but also after years of stressful
work and random research that is not really fulfilling. I don't mean that you
need to spend time on that to be able to tackle bigger projects. I mean that my
past is part of what I am now, and even the bad times can help forge a better
future.

I decided to keep researching the way I was, because it's something that makes
me feel good, and work more slowly, but paying attention to the details as I
like to do.

I'll try to share more about my work, in a technical and a personal level. I'll
keep streaming for some time, and I'll try to use this blog more, as I was in
the past.

So, as I was saying, all this year helped me remember about important things,
and forget a little bit about urgent things.

> "Instead of swimming fast trying to reach as far as I could, pumping my
> blood, splashing water around and having to take a short breath between each
> arm stroke, now I want to dive. I'm far enough from the coast, already.
> 
> I want to stay in the surface until I'm ready, having some rest and breathing
> as much as I want, and then, I'll dive.  I'll discover the colors of the
> coral reef, the sea creatures and even the deepest darkness if I feel like
> it. When I'm done or I'm tired, I'll go back to the surface, take a deep
> breath and have some rest, feeling the sun in my face, until the next
> immersion.
> 
> I'm not going anywhere. I'm not in a hurry anymore."


[^note]: But hey, I'm much more comfortable with low level stuff like ISAs and
  all that. My degree is not useless after all. 

[^blog]: In this blog, as contrast, I can't really know how many people reads
  or interacts with what I write. So I encourage you to contact me and share
  ideas!

[^english]: Making the videos also helped me to feel more confident about my
  English (people understand what I say!) and that is helping me tackle larger
  projects that involve people from different places.

[^people]: More now, that we have some heavy shit going on out there.