I’ve been a bit out lately. Yes, I know. But it was for the greater good!

Two and a half months ago I posted about dotfiles, explaining why it’s important to prepare your tools so you get better at your job. And since then, sadly, nothing changed in my blog. It turns out these last few months have been really challenging, and as time demanding as you can imagine.

For one, I taught Ruby basics, Sinatra and RSpec to seventeen students at Ironhack, an intensive bootcamp for developers which I have been collaborating with for a bit over a year. As always, of course, it was an incredible and humbling experience: teaching is something I truly recommend to anyone interested.

After that, I resumed my normal (it’s a startup, so… you know) day to day at Quipu, the company I founded over two years ago. We are indeed in an exciting moment; we are not only beginning to plan our next major release for our application (that, don’t tell anyone, will truly be kick-ass!), but also have been busy (mostly my co-founder and CEO Roger Dobaño) with the second round of investment in our short history.

Several times we reach a moment in our day-to-day lifes in which we have been sustaining a large amount of work, putting in a lot of hours in order to make up for that. It happens to all of us. And we want to embrace everything and reach perfection, so for sometime it is worth it, but we cannot be there, getting ahold of that vertiginous pace, for long. Peaks happen, and I’m the first to experience them myself, but either you stop for a while and breathe, or you will pay for that in the end.

And I guess that this was what happened to me in the middle of this summer. In the verge of August, I was starting to feel less and less productive, and I came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was changing my approach: not holding so many hours a day sustainedly, but getting some air for a brief period of time.

Luckily, I had already set my holidays to the first weeks of August, so I could really relax. In a computer way of seeing it, I just executed sudo reboot, and it felt sensational. I only used the Internet when necessary. Plus, my circular road trip across the Balcans (Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro) rarely gave me the opportunity to spend much time using the internet, let alone it was not really easy to find a WiFi connection out there.

This reboot lasted two weeks, and after that I came back to the routine. Some post-vacation blues, as expected, and a gradual recovery towards a productive, healthy day-to-day in our beloved but crazy startup world.

In a way, these first weeks have felt like the first seconds (or minutes) of a machine when booting: starting up some services, and incrementally getting used, again, to yourself.