Long time no see!

Last time I was around here I said I was going to re-learn Python and Django, and then I vanished for two long years. So what happened?

Long story short, a twelve thousand kilometer shift from Argentina to Spain, and a big change of habits to say the least.

To be honest, the move itself was easy on my head. Unplug on Friday, take a plane, land at midnight on Saturday, you get Sunday to settle in and recover, and Monday you are working again. Two weeks later you have forgotten all about the jetlag and life is beautiful again, especially when you are two hundred meters from the beach. What can go wrong?

Well… a lot!

So, what happened?

You forget the pain. That happened.

The first time I left Argentina I was 22. I went to Italy, lived there three years and then came back home. Traveling isn’t easier when you get older, and it isn’t easier when you leave family behind with a very different perspective on life than the one you had at 22.

New country, new bureaucracy. Documents, papers, permits and a long list of things you never thought about and have to address anyway. The timezone hits harder than expected, and you want fewer hours of shift on your agenda, so a new job has to come by too.

I left Argentina in the middle of summer and landed in Málaga in a warm, cozy winter that felt more like spring. Which was lovely, right up until I worked out what it actually meant… summer was around the corner. And I felt it.

Then finally some air to breathe. The winter after that one was calm and I got a real chance to recover and relax a little. This summer is now coming to an end and I properly enjoyed it, I got to travel and see new places. Portugal, by the way, is amazing. I fell in love with half of it!

Meanwhile, the world around me…

Feels like ages ago, but AI was already bigger than a trend. Everybody was talking about it, a few people were actually using it, and nobody was certain whether it was good or bad.

It was (is?) a storm that took the world by surprise, and we were all loving it, fearing it and trying to work out our place around it at the same time. FOMO was king. Gurus were thriving on LinkedIn, and updated CVs and ATS-friendly everything were the bread and butter of every single day. On top of that you were supposed to catch up with all of it before it was too late, get a ChatGPT subscription, but wait, Claude got a new update this week, and also you should watch this YT video, follow that channel, download this repo, use n8n to automate something (wait, are you still doing it all yourself? that is so 2020s) and of course build with it too, because who doesn’t have forty hours a week spare to learn it all?

A thousand tools to watch, learn, subscribe to and use. For me, too much chaos to see any clear path ahead.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we would be better off without it. I just like to learn something and then put it to use. Trends rise and disappear daily, and I would rather not spend my weekends behind a keyboard on something that may never get adopted, and that even if it does get adopted I might not touch for a very long time.

Now the dust is starting to settle. AI is being used, ROI is measured in every company, and it even became part of the annual bonus. Life and AI seem to have found some common ground.

Ok but… what does that have to do with Python?

Python is a language that is everywhere. Easy to write, easier to read, and a lot of modern things are being built around it.

Yes, I know about Go, Rust and all that stuff, but Python is still undisputed… for some reason nobody seems to have a real need to change something that already works well enough. So Python is the one thing that stood through the storm. Learning it is as valid as it always was, and it opens the way back to Back-End, to Fullstack, and now to AI as well.

On top of that, AI looks like something that is going to become more and more part of our day to day, unlike blockchain and the whole crypto wave before it. (Again, it is used in plenty of places for plenty of things, but we are not living in the blockchain world we were promised a few years ago.)

So this is me closing a loop, coming back home, from my web developer days, to Front-End, to Fullstack and AI.

So… what am I doing?

Step one is modernizing this website, because dust was starting to accumulate. Step two is writing this hello world / welcome back post and trying to find my way into writing at all. I have always loved the idea of writing, but when I sit down I have too many thoughts calling for attention at once, and doing it in a language that isn’t mine doesn’t exactly help. (AI is helping me here, I won’t deny it.)

I’m also already making progress on Python and writing some code here and there. I will be publishing things on GitHub, and some projects and stuff here too. The idea is to code all of it in Python, because that is the only way to really learn it, and since I’m coding anyway and AI is all over the place now in a mandatory way (no prompting, no bonus), working on both at once makes sense.

September is the new January

Living on this side of the world has its perks, and one of them is watching how everybody puts things in motion at this time of year. Goals, plans, gym, diet, habits, it all comes alive in September. I think I got caught in it too, so here I am.

Wish me luck and bear with me, we may do something crazy very soon. But just to be clear, I won’t be making any promises about cadence or progress, even if I do have my mind set on working things out towards a better, more interesting and more fun future with Python side by side with React.

See you soon… ish.