Disclaimer: a lot of One piece references on this post, it's Oda's fault which is dropping a lot of good chapters during this last months.

2022... What a year it has been!

The 2022 for me was a year full of changes, both at work and on a personal level.

it's been a very important year for my carreer in the tech world, allowing me to grow and improve. Let's see some of the reasons.

Me.changeJob(Companies.Moneyfarm): NewExperience

For sure the biggest change is that after 3 years in my previous company, which I was very fond of, I decided to change job. During the 2021 I was starting to attend some tech conferences and meetups and I've started to see how much things I needed to learn and I've noticed thanks to this meetups that I wasn't growing enough . So , almost for fun , I've applied for a company which I knew very well since I was also a customer, Moneyfarm. I had some remorse because in my previous company, I was really enjoying my time because we were all friends (some were from high-school) and the environment was very good, but I felt like I was no longer growing.

It was the first time I had to go through a selection process and I was anxious every day since the day of my first interview. I was keeping wondering if the choice that I've made was the right one, if maybe was better to not change job and remain where I was. I admit that I've also spent some nights without sleeping keeping wondering about this big question (imagine me like the little Bocchi from Bocchi the rock anime):

I do or I don't ?

After the technical interview I was sure that they didn't like me and I was not good enough (impostor syndrome intensifies), surprisingly after some days I've discovered that the interview was good and I moved to the next step. When I've arrived at the last step the HR which has followed my journey called me making an offer and I should have let they know in a certain amount of time. The offer was a little bit higher of my salary in my previous company, but it wasn't the money was not the problem.

I was struggling between entering into a company which works in a very structured way and this would allow me to learn new things , for example real Agile, SCRUM, Kanban and so on, or remain in a company which I really liked from the empathic and human side but was no longer allowing me to grow professionally. There was also another big jump in the void: Scala. In my previous company I was working with PHP (I can hear you saying to me: PHP SHIT!!!!) so switching to Scala (which I didn't even know existed at the time) seemed like a big change , and big change scares people. Also another factor was that in my previous company I was a full-stack and so I've worked also on FE, in Moneyfarm instead I've applied for the BE role.

After days of struggling my ambition of becoming a better developer won , and so I went officially to my previous employer to announce that I wanted to resign and change job (it was not so easy, I even shed a few tears 😢😢). as Blackbeard said in one piece: "A man's dream will never die!", I wanted to keep pursuing my "carreer one piece" which is to become a great developer and I'm sure that this change helped and will help me also in the future to achieve it.

So in april I've started my new journey and nowadays I can confirm that I've made the right choice, I've discovered a new world of things to learn and I've also discovered Scala, a new language which now I honestly like, although I still have to learn it well since there are a lot of different concepts which I wasn't used (Monads, Functional programming, concurrency, parallelism and the list goes on ...) . Also I've discovered that I don't dislike to work only on the BE side of things. Designing APIs, structure in a consistent way the databases, working with microservices, are all things which I like currently and I'm enjoying doing it.

I was a little bit like this when I started this new adventure:

Little sad story: My first day in the new company was a mess since I've took the covid-19 some days before 😢, so my 15-year-old brother had to go to the office in Milan to retrieve my laptop instead of me.

How the smartworking changed my life 🛬

Changing company allowed me to explore also a new way of working and interact with colleagues: Smart working.

I was used to go into the office every day and have contact with my boss and colleagues , changing from this to zoom and slack was not easy for me (and still I suffer a little bit from this). But the good side of this is that now I have completely freedom of working where I want , and since I love to travel this is perfect for me!

For example in November I had the chance to travel a lot, firstly I went to Rome from the 30th of October until the 2nd of November. I've worked only the 2nd of November in a really cool co-working space , then with the train I've come back to Milan. after that I've discovered that one of my favorites group was playing in London (Rise against) and so I've booked an hostel and a cheap flight and then I went to London for 4 days where I've worked in our office . I had also the chance to visit London and meet my colleagues in person. one week later I went again in London to attend The functiona Scala conference , a very good experience which allowed me to learn a bunch of new things about the Scala ecosystem. It was also a great experience to see how much costs living in London and if this city can be a good choice for me to move in (SPOILER: London costs a loooooooot) , since I'm considering moving out of Italy.

This is a summary of my travels in 2022, in 2023 I'm planning to do some smartworking in some european cities like Barcellona, Varsavia and Budapest:

Smartworking is not only working from home to wake up later in my opinion, it's a great chance that we have and we should make the most out of it. Usually, people make trips only during summer or christmas holidays and that's it, I think that it's a bit limiting travelling only during certain periods of time and since we are so lucky to have the chance to travel while work (we can also for example live 3 months in each country) we should travel whenever possible.

Ideally In the future I want to travel at least 1 week per month and visit new european cities.

Me.goTo(Conferences.Codemotion): NewKnowledge

During the 2022 I had the chance to attend a lot of meetups with other colleagues in Milan, some of them became a smart working group with whom I meet to go co-working around milan. the biggest conference that I've attended in this year was the Codemotion, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) tech conference in Italy. It was an amazing and really insipiring experience, I've really enjoyed a lot to listen to other colleagues experiences, it was also a good chance to meet with some old and new friends!!

I've talked about Codemotion more in details here if you're interested

Me.goTo(Workshops.CodeRetreat): NewKnowlede

Also during 2022 with a friend of mine we went to a real cool experience: The global day of Coderetreat, a real cool experience which allowed me to try the pair programming in large groups and the TDD (Test Driven development) . It was very cool to see how switching with different partners to solve the same problem, resulted in obtain new different solution each time (even if it didn't solve the problem, it was quite interesting see how peoples think differently about how approaching to a problem).

Me.goTo(Conferences.FunctionalScala): NewKnowledge

Some months after the Codemotion I had the chance to travel to London to attend the most important Scala's conference in the world. It was quite intensive (a lot of talks one after another without too much rest). A great chance to meet with some people like the Tapir's creator (a Scala library) and many other people with whom we talked about a lot of different topics even if not Scala related.

More details on my thoughts about this conference can be found here

Twitch Streams

I've also tried to do some lives on twitch to interview people from tech world (unfortunately only italian, here you can find the recordings) to talk about their working experience, how they've reached their current role, their thought and opinions about some topics. It was a really interesting journey, I've had the chance to talk with a lot of interesting people (a lot of CTOs of very cool startups and companies for example) but I've archived this activity for the time being since I'm working on other projects that stimulates me more.

What I learned from 2022 📚📚

Life has taught me a lot this year. I'd like to share some of those learnings with you, hoping that it helps.

• Discipline is very very very important in my life, trying to create it it's not that simple but it's necessary. A stupid example: since I work from home almost the entire month , it means no physical activity. So I've joined a gym and I've started to go imposing myself to go at least 3 times per week. The discipline in this example lies in being able to go three times a week without procrastinating. This allows me to improve and apply discipline in different aspects of my life (both professional and not)

• Analyze in pragmatic way the choices that life offers to you

• Going to conferences it's amazing! you can find so many interesting people that wants to talk with you and share their thoughts and point of view on technologies or specific topics. I think that the networking is more important of some talks. Going to conferences and meetups allowed me also to find a lot of friends and create so many connections! with some of them we created a group with which we go co-working in Milan.

• Tech communities are really a big plus of our work: thanks to some telegram communities I've learned so mucchhhh. It's also thanks to one community in particular that I've found the will to change and try a new experience. Everyday I see a lot of people that receives help with a lot of different topics and I think that this is a very big plus of our job, not many other jobs have such communities which can help you in every aspect of the work (help with interviews, technical suggestions and so on). I think that every developer should be in at least one community , even reading other people messages could be helpful

  

• Smartworking allows you to travel when you feel the need of it, use this opportunity! why do you need to travel only in specifics periods (and spend more money).

What do you think? what are your most valuable 2022's lessons? Please share them here in the comments, I'm really curious!