2016 review

 December 12, 2016  |  Enrique Saez Gil

2016 is coming to an end and I would like to look back and review what I have been up to during the last year:

Hackathons

During 2016 I attended 4 Hackathons:

THack Mallorca

I attended THack Mallorca as a participant with my former colleague Tudor Barbu. Joining two other developers from MiNube we worked for the whole weekend and won several prizes. I wrote a post about the experience here.

Skyscanner internal Hackathon

Another team from Skyscanner flew to Barcelona for some days and we worked in an internal Hackathon around some of our projects we felt could use some extra manpower. The Hackathon was very successful as we finished all the projects we started and as a consequence, some of my colleagues published an open source library: pyfailsafe.

HackUPC

I attended HackUPC in Barcelona as a sponsor to help out hackers make use of the Skyscanner API. It was my first Hackathon as a sponsor and the experience was really good, read more about it here.

LauzHack

I attended LauzHack in Switzerland once again as a sponsor. I delivered a talk to help hackers get started with the Skyscanner API and assist them over the rest of the weekend along my colleague Manuel Miranda. I wrote about the experience here.

Meetups

Being part of the Barcelona Ambassador group at Skyscanner’s Barcelona office provided me with the opportunity to both attend and help organizing multiple events for the software community in Barcelona:

Python Meetup

I have attended and help organizing most of the monthly Barcelona Python Meetup held at the office. From being a regular attendant I transitioned after my manager’s encouragement and the help of some of my team mates such as Pau Freixes, Manuel Miranda and Jordi Soucheiron to deliver a talk. I wrote about the experience here.

I continue to enjoy this Meetup and keep meeting new interesting people. It’s an event I would like to keep going over the upcoming year as well.

Furthermore, I attended in November the Madrid Python Meetup, check the post I wrote about it.

Docker Meetup

During the weekend of the Docker anniversary, there were multiple events run all over the world. It was an informal gathering to talk about this technology. There was a brief introduction about Docker and a hands on lab in which we setup an example project.

I also attended and helped organizing another Docker Meetup, this time during the week, in which Matt Feigal, an engineer from Google, talked about Kubernetes. His talk was quite interesting as I could see a lot of similar concepts between the AWS cloud and the Google cloud.

VLC weekend Meetup

The VLC board met in Barcelona at our office (Skyscanner) during the weekend to discuss about their plans and whatnot. I had the opportunity to hang out with them during Saturday evening and during Sunday. Although we were not involved at all in their discussions it was nice to talk with the maintainers and leaders of such an important Open Source project.

Talks

As I mentioned previously, I delivered a talk in the Barcelona Python Meetup. It was a good experience since I learnt a lot while preparing for the talk and I look forward to deliver another one in the future. Take a look at the slides and the GitHub repo I created for it.

I also delivered a talk at LauzHack about the Skyscanner API. Check the slides.

Finally, I delivered a short closing talk at HackUPC’16.

Open Source Contributions

This year I started putting my GitHub account esaezgil to good use. I contributed to 3 different projects: Jinja, aiohttp and Pretix. My contribution to Jinja is still pending to be merged but the other four contributions I did to both Pretix and aiohttp were merged.

It was definitely a rewarding, sometimes challenging but overall good learning experience. I plan to keep contributing over the next year to Open Source projects.

I wrote about my contributions here:

Internet famous

I created my Twitter account, follow me :) @eqirn

I created this Blog with Hugo, GitHub pages and automatic deployment through Wercker. This was an iteration of my first attempt to create a blog using Wordpress. I did not like the Wordpress interface and it looked quite shabby.

I recorded a podcast along my former colleague Nicolas Vayias about our experience as a recent employee of a rapidly growing startup. It was an interesting experience since the interview was not scripted and the host, Richard Davidson, was in another office in a different country.

Skyscanner acquisition

I was on annual leave when I got to hear about this breaking news:

Ctrip acquired Skyscanner for $1.7 billion

Exciting times ahead for us working towards helping travelers worldwide!

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