Thank you Martin

This is the first of a series of posts in which I want to thank the people (apart from my family and friends) that have helped me in the past to grow as a professional and of course as a human being. Life has taught me a lot of things, and I want to put in practice one of the most important, to be grateful.

In this case I would like to thank Martin Bakkegaard, he was my mentor in 2010 while I was enjoying my internship at UVData in Aalborg (Denmark), it was a really good part of my life, I remember myself as an ultra-motivated young programmer, leaving my little island lost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, to explore the real world for the first time.

During my internship I discovered many things, I learned a lot about what life is supposed to be, how a totally different society from mine works and I started to discover what kind of person I would like to become in my life.

Six years has passed since I was in Denmark, my life is totally different right now, I do not live in Canary Islands anymore, I feel like I have lost my identity from one place to claim myself as citizen of the world, I am trying to find my place but I’ve not found it yet, I’ve realized how hard life could be, I’ve lived and worked in Madrid, Barcelona and Amsterdam, I’ve met such wonderful people along this years but… I feel extremely uncomfortable.

I feel very uncomfortable because of a lot of things: Capitalist mentality of people that blinds them from the awesome nature of the human being, non solidarity and aggressive competence of the companies and much more things that I think that have no sense in this society. People fight to earn money rather to become better humans.

All this uncomfortable feeling, mixed with the fact that I do not know what to do with my life and what direction I should take, makes me think a lot about my career. One of the things I have clear as water is what kind of professional I would like to be, the answer is a professional like Martin Bakkegaard.

When he met me in 2010 I was a little boy who knew nothing, I didn’t know about Scrum, Generics, Clean Code and much more. He took me patiently and he gave me insights about important things I should learn in my career. He was very kind, patient, relaxed and the image of a mentor.

When I finished my internship there, he wrote a recommendation letter for me, I still have that letter and I store it as one of my most precious treasures, that letter didn’t help me from the professional point of view since I’ve never used it for that, but it helped me a lot from the personal side, and that’s the point of all this post, motivation.

More than his huge technical knowledge and his skills to be the guru that he actually is, he has one of the skills that I have tried to adapt to my life and way to act, he was one of the most inspirational individuals I’ve found and made me feel motivated with the things I was doing.

I took the knowledge that he gave me and the knowledge I got from the mentors I found during the next years and now I’m trying to apply it in the companies I work in, with unsuccessful results because software craftsmanship is not valued here in Spain, I failed a lot in life and I will probably fail a lot more.

But I know what kind of mentor I want to become, a motivational and inspirational one.

Thank you Martin.