On November 4th 2019, I started working for Beat, “the fastest-growing ride-hailing app in Latin America”.

Beat has been a milestone for the greek tech ecosystem; one of the first big exits, a smash hit abroad that also remained a love brand in Greece, a proponent of Open-Source and Agile, a company that relentlessly pushed forward with innovation, a great engineering culture and probably the first Go shop around here.

You can see why I was so excited and moved all the way to Athens for this new chapter; well, a whole year has passed and here are some random highlights on these past 365 days in my professional life

• Joined a newly created, ragtag team which turned into a cross-functional, high-performing cohesive unit
• Saw our work impact the way that the company traded punches with Uber and Didi
• Became member of the curator team for Patron, Beat’s flagship OSS project, powering the entirety of our microservices architecture
• Was surrounded by driven, extremely smart folks, which motivated me to become better each and every day
• Learned to think in terms of distributed systems
• Learned to think in terms of business impact
• Learned to think in terms of an Agile team workflow
• Developed some great mentor-mentee relationships
• Saw the impact of the pandemic on the ride-hailing industry first hand. Took upon tasks to help the company exit the turmoil with as few scars as possible
• Got promoted

In smaller, more specific things

• Learned PHP and Groovy
• Wrote loads of Go
• Put some serious work in K8S
• Sharpened my perspective on testing
• Presented both to internal meetups and an international Go conference
• Tried my best to further foster the OSS culture inside the company. Also had time to contribute not only to Go, but also other projects like Consul, Packer, Mattermost, Learn Go with Tests
• Typed more than 130k commands on the terminal

  $ cat ~/.logs/zsh-history-20* | wc -l
  131106
  

• Opened, reviewed and discussed over 350 Github PRs
• I understood that I’m not as good a communicator as I thought I was; fortunately there are great people around who can help me become better (and are actively doing so)
• Grew accustomed to living with a Mac ^^

Final words

All things considered, 2020 has been for most people a stressful, depressing year that should just move out of the way.

Personally, I feel extremely blessed that this past year has been at least kind to me and people around me; I don’t take it for granted and hope to spread some of these good vibes all around.

So, with year number two lining up, I’m thinking to myself. Where next? 🚀