Today is my first "English Birthday". Exactly a year ago today, I got off a plane and stepped on English ground for first time. There were no plans, just improvise each day; neither security, just streets and adventure.

Several months before I decided to leave Spain and search something to learn in other places. Stability is fine, but I'm the kind of person who can not be happy without challenge... so I left my job and I packed my suitcases. To have help when you need it is fine as well, but I'm the kind of person who can not feel emotion without risk... so I leave my family and friends and I said goodbye.

I needed only a few days to fall in love with Newcastle. After two weeks exploring the city and enjoying the weather -I'm serious with that- I decided try to stay. I was so happy with my short English experience, Carlos and Cristina became like a second family for me -I wasn't all alone after all (thank you! nothing would have been possible without you ♥)- and I met Lowis, who opened his house for me (thank you mate!). All was amazing, but the best was yet to come; after a few days since I decided to stay, I was with Matthew in my first job interview at Performance Horizon.

Crossed the entrance.

I was following Matt searching a meeting room, and I remember I saw some chess boards on desks, a lot of Grafana panels on the wall and some nerf darts on the floor, and I thought: "oh guy... what a wonderful place...".

Definitely I was amazed, but all those things are nothing compared with the best thing that UK has: the people; and especially, people at PH. What makes me feel really lucky and worth more than any other thing is the team I belong to, the chance to work with a heterogeneous set of some of the most talented people I have ever known, in a wide skill spectrum for both, technical and human aspects.

When I started, my English was even more awful than now, and in some moments I had doubts about if all would be ok, but all the people had an infinite patience without a bad face, what I always got from everyone was help and sympathy with a big smile. I want to say thank you from my heart to everybody for that, and specially to Ania, Rocky and Steven for their awesome support in my first steps.

With this people and this environment, along this year my personal development has increased dramatically. From my point of view, the big difference has been to find in PH people who has given me some companionship in ways I haven't had before. It's hard to explain, but all my life I have felt some kind of non-physical loneliness, with no one to talk and share knowledge about things that I really like. In that sense, even in spite of the language barrier, there has been some kind of understanding over the words, and all the moments discussing about computational consciousness, about the no iron fusion in a star core when the star ends the main sequence, about the faster way to solve a Sudoku (miss you Jamie!), or about Roger Penrose books... are priceless.

Maybe I'm with Rocky doing some kind of mental disassembled for 3D printers and assembling it again in an improved composition to have a full color 3D printer, or maybe I'm eating sweets with Martin while we are playing with Tensorflow, immersed in a Nerf war, trying to resolve a security challenge (last one was based on One-time pad! ♥) or thinking in creative and non-convectional ways to improve the code before the commit.

It's weird, because I'm 2000km from my family, from my friends, from the streets where I grew; but, for the first time in my life, I really feel... that I'm at home.

Thank you all.

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Archivado en: English, Personal, Reflexiones.

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Archivado en: Música.