Looking and Moving Forward

I wanted to start this year off with a new blog built on top of Github Pages and Jekyll, and a look back on what went well (and didn’t) in 2013.

The Job

The single biggest event of this year was completely uprooting our lives, packing up, and leaving the state. We did this with a car full of a few clothes, a box of important documents, a laptop, 1 cat, 1 dog, 1 baby, and 2 adult humans. We had basically lived in New Mexico our entire lives and we left behind two houses and everyone we knew in order to pursue new opportunities in Seattle. This decision was made with less than a month of notice, but not without enormous scrutiny and worry.

Fears

The best way I can describe this entire ordeal is terrifying. Imagine completely leaving any comfort zone that you’ve created in order to pursue something nearly completely unknown. The next way I’d describe it is liberating. There’s something incredible about being able to pickup and move anywhere. However these were the gambles:

• Leaving a job I was very good at and all the security that came with it
• Downsizing from a large house that we owned into an apartment
• Selling that house in a reasonable amount of time
• Getting rid of a lot of our stuff as quickly as possible
• Finding an apartment near my new job blindly that also accepts pets and has enough room for us
• Financing this whole ordeal

How’d that work out?

The good news is, we had to get lucky 2-3 times in order to pull it off , and we nailed all of em. We got an offer on the house the same day we listed it, and sold it shortly after. We also had a successful yard sale where we sold most of what we owned. We made the drive across the country in 3 days, and we’ve settled in here so far! Our finances have stabilized, and we’re already seeing the benefits of living in the Pacific Northwest.

I really wanted to write a post about this during that frantic period, but that would have made it even worse at the time. There’s so much more detail about each of these individual events, but that’s best left for another time. If you’re ever interested, come have a beer or coffee with me and we can chat about it.

2014

Without further ado, lets talk about what my plans are for this year. The theme shared by these is that I’d like to try and build a personal brand. Now that I’m less rooted, it’s important that I publicize and adapt wherever possible. Having said that here’s the plan:

1. I want to publish multiple open source projects.
2. I want to actively work on 1 bigger and already established open source project
3. I want to register aaron-torres.com, use it to build a personal portfolio complete with blog, code, resume, etc.
4. I want to write 2 blog posts a week
5. I want to publish 3 Android applications (which includes learning Android)
6. I want to work on a web application for my own personal business

This is a LOT to do in a short amount of time, however, I’m already off to a running start.

What’s been done.

I’ve hit the ground running, lets get to it:

1. Registered aaron-torres.com (hopefully you’re reading it right now). Started redoing my resume and will have everything up soon
2. Published gocolorize, an ANSI color library https://github.com/agtorre/gocolorize
3. Started contributing to the Revel Go framework (http://robfig.github.io/revel/)

If You’d Like to Read More.

Drop me a line! Star my projects on Github. I hope that I can slowly make myself into a content provider where the things I share are interesting and helpful. I appreciate you take the time to read this far, and I hope that I hold your interest.