Here we are again on this monthly update in which I talk about everything and nothing — a small summary of what I am doing, arranging and brewing, both on tech than in life.

The new year has come and, with it, a plethora of new challenges! Life is never linear or straightforward: December has been the worst and the best month so far. Can January be even more disruptive? I hope not. Anyway, I am ready to face 2019 with the idea that this will be a year of change. Every year is a year of change, of course, but 2019 is where a lot of pending life-events are starting to pile up. So, or I make it, or I break it.

Here we are again for this monthly update. I wanted to put other blog posts in between, but I had super busy days; both in work, and in private life, and psychologically. November has been a challenging month. But let’s start from the beginning.

It is November. The Holiday season is upon us! And, most important, I am back after a 6-month hiatus. What happened in this months? Why it took so long? Let’s go over this step by step in this kind of “release notes” for myself.

Now that I finally completed my PhD studies, I started rethinking about my path up here. This is a path I started a long time ago. For some reason, this was the path I traced for myself since my childhood. When I was 10 (or earlier, I don’t really know for sure) I answered for the first time the question: “what do you want to do as a grown up?”. And the answer was “I’ll make games” (“I’ll make Mario’s game”, to be very precise).

I’m back! During the last week, I had a beautiful experience as a volunteer at the Nucl.ai 2016 conference, one of the nicest Game AI related conferences in Europe.

I like this conference. It has a very informal atmosphere and both speakers and attendees are incredibly friendly and very willing in giving advice. You can go there like a complete no-one (for instance, like me) and you can speak and have a beer with Lead AI programmer in Triple-A games, in top notch industries like Google, Blizzard or Epic as if they are your friends.