The First Step

This post is also available in Spanish.

For several months now, a question has become recurrent for me: with a world changing at this speed, am I dedicating my time to what truly matters? The routine of a full-time job pushes you into constant execution, into optimizing the next sprint. But the feeling of being at a historical turning point—with AI redefining the rules of the game—generated an increasing dissonance within me. I felt the urgency to pause, not to rest, but to think. That’s when I understood that the greatest risk is not taking a step into the uncertain; the greatest risk is standing still, applying yesterday’s solutions to tomorrow’s problems.

This reflection led me to make a decision: I am leaving my role at a large company to start a new chapter as an independent consultant. It’s not just a career change; it’s a commitment to a different model. It’s the decision to leave the silo to connect ideas and return to the communities that shaped me so much.

Above all, it’s a commitment to time. Time to read, to explore, and to think big. Alan Kay used to say that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. But inventing requires space, requires creative leisure, and a mindset of exploration¹. My goal is to deliberately build that space. In this new era, AI is not an end, but an enabler that allows us to reach horizons that were once science fiction. As I explored in my post about Resonant Coding (also available in Spanish), my interest is not in acceleration for acceleration’s sake, but in using these new tools to start imagining what questions we can now ask ourselves.

In practice, this translates into several facets. I will be offering consulting and training services, focusing on quantitative software architecture², the development of agentic solutions³, and training teams in the effective use of AI. On the other hand, and as I explained in the post about why I created Phorma (also available in Spanish), my project Phorma will continue to be my laboratory for building the bridge between industry and the scientific world through Research Software Engineering. The rest of my time will be dedicated to teaching, giving back to the communities what they have given me, and to that necessary free experimentation.

The future is uncertain, but I have never felt so much enthusiasm for taking the first step.

Notes