Looking backward and forward

2016 was with no doubt an eventful year for many.

On March 12th, I married my high school sweetheart. We’d been together for around 9 years and engaged for like 4 of those. Best day ever.

During the last quarter of 2015, we cofounded Alias Payments to build Gasolina Móvil. We became part of Parallel18′s first cohort and after six months we were closing a deal with PumaEnergy.

On August, my wife and I packed our things and moved to Hartford, CT for her doctoral internship. Its our first time living away from Puerto Rico, but we’re making it work. I’m still finding the right balance when working mostly from home. Since living in the East Coast, we drove to Québec City for my wife’s birthday, visited beautiful Boston way too many times, spent Thanksgiving in NYC with new friends, visited Stars Hollow(Washington Depot, CT), hiked some local trails, visited the casino at Mohegan Sun and more.

During 2016, Blimp was rebranded as a consulting company with products of it’s own. We knew we could help more companies and digital agencies build awesome things and we did. We made our first two hires, a developer and a project manager. We’ve worked on many interesting consulting projects during this year and the next couple of months look very promising.

Moving forward

During the past couple of months I’ve had to split my time between consulting projects and our ongoing products. I let this constant context switching burn me out constantly for a while there. As a result of this, I’ll start dedicating most of my time to our products and phase out from the consulting part of the business.

There’s no doubt I love building products and somewhere in there is where I’m best at and have the most impact. This is why it makes the most sense to me to spend more time doing so.

Last year I also contributed way less to open source projects, mostly because of the lack of time. Looking forward to have some more time again to do so.

On February, I’ll be speaking at PyCaribbean. If you haven’t get your tickets now, this year it’ll be happening in Puerto Rico!

On March, I’ll be attending EmberConf with @gcollazo.

Sometime later in 2017, my wife is graduating. Hello future Dr. Conde-Padilla PsyD. I’m very proud of you!

Here’s to family and friends, being healthy, happy, and better, more learning, more reading. Here’s to 2017.