Bringing the podcast back, solo this time

A few years ago I had a podcast with one of my best friends, Alexis Durán, where we talked about what it means to be a Software Engineer, because in this job it’s not only about the code. That was literally the name: No es solo código. Then life happened and we paused it.

This year everyone in our industry has been through a lot, and I keep feeling that it’s something I should do again. So I’m bringing it back, in Spanish, and this time on my own.

I don’t know what shape it will take yet, or how often new episodes will come out. Maybe weekly, maybe whenever I have something worth saying. I just feel like I have something to say that could be useful, or at least I hope so, and the only way to find out is to start and see how it goes.

The first episode: decisive

I wrote down how I’ve been feeling about being a developer right now, and one word kept coming back to me: decisive. It feels decisive in two ways. If you don’t speak Spanish, here are my condensed thoughts.

Decisive as in deciding. Every week there’s a new tool, a new workflow, a new model that changes how I work. There was a time when WWDC in June or a new major version of React gave me months to learn, understand and teach. Now I’m deciding how I work day to day, week to week. Since this last WWDC, Anthropic released Fable and Expo shipped 2 major versions. Zoom into almost any two weeks since and the ground moved under our feet.

What has helped me here is being kind to myself. The work is going to feel hard. It won’t feel like the last 14 years, when I had a sense of mastery and knew what was going on. So I go outside more, spend time with things that don’t change, like a hill that has been there for thousands of years, or relationships that look the same as six months ago. Not everything is changing, only a narrow slice of my life is.

Decisive as in a turning point. For years, when someone asked me what I do, I said “I make apps”, and “make” had a very clear picture: open Xcode, WebStorm or Zed, write code, run it, validate it, ship it. That doesn’t look the same anymore. I spent almost 20 years trying to become a really good programmer, and I’m realizing I don’t need to program that much anymore. I need to design products and build things with everything I’ve learned. That’s exciting and also weird and a bit scary.

If the micro side is about how I treat myself, the macro side is about how we treat each other. There’s no single right answer for everyone, so the phrase that stuck with me is be reflective, not reactive. When someone makes a choice I don’t agree with, I try to ask why they think that and what I can learn from it.

In a weird way this reminds me of the early App Store days, when everything felt new and possible. I feel privileged to have lived that, and I think we’ll look back at this period the same way: how lucky we were to live something like this twice.

That’s what I want the podcast to be. Not hot takes, just an honest conversation about what’s changing, what isn’t, and how we’re all figuring it out as we go. If you speak Spanish and this resonates with you, I’d love for you to listen, and if you have topics you’d like me to talk about, let me know.