2025, With Notes

Another lap around the sun, another year ending. I like to reflect on what happened, but this time I want to annotate the year, not just wrap it up (I will share some numbers, because I like data). I did and experienced a lot, some things more visible than others. Much overlapped: travel blurred into speaking, speaking into teaching, teaching into writing, writing into organizing.

These are notes (and some pictures) I’m sharing while the year is still around, and I still can feel some of these things.

On Moving Around

Notes from being elsewhere

I moved a lot this year.

New Orleans for The Carpentries, a board retreat for imagining the future and drawing the organization’s strategy in uncertain times. São Paulo for DISC Unconf by NumFOCUS to discuss Open Science and Open Source in Latin America. Thailand with the CSID Network, to meet new people and share how my communities support climate change and infectious disease work. Durham for a keynote on community building and open-source sustainability at useR!, and San Diego for the Thriving Together and CZI Open Science meeting.

Travel is always a mix of excitement and exhaustion.

Each trip had a purpose, but what stayed with me was how being elsewhere reshaped my attention. Travel compresses time: conversations get faster, and meeting people in a different place helps connect beyond agendas. Exhaustion also arrives earlier than expected. Living at the end of the world adds an extra layer of complexity to traveling.

I noticed how much my work depends on presence: being available, listening (or reading) closely, noticing what isn’t said, and asking the right questions.

I also realized how much travel takes out of me now, even when I like to be in new places and share time with people, and how intentional I must be about when it’s worth it.

A small footnote here: we enjoy hosting our friends at our house, showing them our city, and cooking for them. And also try their food and see our place with a new eye after their visit.

On Speaking

Notes from being listened to

Speaking is a privilege. It means being among the few whose voice is given time and attention. Speaking this year felt more like translating. Between communities, disciplines, languages, and expectations.

I started the year with a keynote on lessons learned from building and translating Teaching Tech Together, and I ended the year with another keynote on the same underlying topic. This circle reminded me that even when ideas are familiar and we’ve heard them many times, evidence-based knowledge still needs to be revisited, refined, and shared. Especially when we know we can do better. It also highlights the importance of reflection on our own practice. Being a keynote speaker at useR! In Durham was a moment of pause because it forced me to articulate things I often hold implicitly about community participation, sustainability, and responsibility.

In the more than 20 talks I delivered, I found myself contextualizing more, and still grounding things in practical tips and concrete examples. Letting ideas unfold at their own pace. These talks were meant to keep the conversation alive.

On Teaching

Notes from learning while teaching

I taught undergraduates at Austral University. Teaching early-career students keeps me honest and always made me to reflect on how we can still teach efficiently, with students at the center, even as genAI is around.

Teaching also continued in community spaces. I ran or spoke at R-Ladies and R User Groups meetups, where teaching is less about curriculum and more about letting learning happen socially. I also taught for the Software Sustainability Institute, equipping researchers with digital skills and I participated in other spaces like ORCA.

Alongside this, I led the rOpenSci Champions Program. For the first time, we ran the entire program in Spanish! I’m so proud of this milestone.

This edition was more than just a translation; it was the adaptation of content, the redevelopment of processes, a redistribution of support and focus, and the inclusion of diverse perspectives and topics that enrich the program. I enjoyed helping our instructor improve and develop each workshop. Co-creating all the training and the final curriculum is one of my favourite parts of teaching. Working through these changes and improvements taught us the value of flexibility and an always-improving mindset.

Teaching in different human languages highlighted how much friction language adds, and how much disappears when people don’t have to translate themselves. Teaching is also a great reminder that one of the best ways to learn something is to have to teach it.

On Writing

Notes from thinking on the page

Writing is part of my job and a way to give shape to my ideas and share them, it’s also a way to process the year when is happening, and it’s still hard to do in several human languages. 😅

I wrote for rOpenSci about technical work and community building, for R-Ladies, for The Carpentries and for my personal website. I was also part of teams that wrote posts after a meetings or papers. Some pieces were explanatory, some reflective, some experimental.

I tried new formats: linkedtorials and skytorials, testing how ideas move when less linear. Writing felt less like finished pieces and more like building pathways, letting readers enter at different points and follow different threads.

I also worked on finishing and revising several books we maintain at rOpenSci (I couldn’t make any progress with the second edition of T3). That kind of writing is collective and slow. It requires letting go of ownership and paying attention to how knowledge ages and evolves. It is also very rewarding when the content improves through community contributions.

Being interviewed twice by Nature, once on programming languages and once on spreadsheets for research, reminded me that writing and speaking often serve as translation. What is obvious in one community may need careful framing in another.

Writing, for me, remained a way to make thinking visible and accountable. It’s always a rich source of feedback and a tool for improving my work.

On Building and Maintaining Communities

Notes from holding things together

Even when I can count many things, much of my work this year didn’t produce artifacts. It produced continuity and a clearer sense of what needs to be sustained.

With rOpenSci, I continued leading the multilingual project and reached an important milestone: the Developer Guide is now fully translated in three languages. Slowly, carefully, with many hands involved. This kind of work teaches patience and respect for process. It keeps reminding me that access is something we build deliberately, not something that just happens.

R-Ladies asked for steady attention this year: rebranding, internal organization, and the quiet work of keeping things running. This kind of sometimes-invisible maintenance only works because of extraordinary Leadership and a Global Team, and committed chapter organizers around the world. It’s a reminder that resilience comes from shared responsibility.

Serving on The Carpentries board brought another perspective. Supporting the transition to a 501(c)(3) and taking part in strategy conversations: on education, AI, research software engineering, and supporting subcommunities, made the long-term view unavoidable. The questions focused on sustainable growth with alignment: how to evolve without losing what matters.

We organized LatinR online again this year to keep the Latin American community visible and connected. Once again, we enjoyed the depth of the community work and knowledge and reinforce how much strength there is in showing up collectively.

Across all of these spaces, I witnessed the courage it takes to lead communities in a moment when DEI and science are under attack. What stayed with me was steadiness, a commitment to values, even when holding them is costly. These communities continue to make room for people to do good work together and lead the way.

What this year leaves me with is less about answers and more about direction. And the future of this work feels unmistakably collective: built through collaboration across communities.

On Health

Notes from taking care of me

This year, health was present in a calm, steady way. No surprises. I had my regular checkups, and I’m in good shape.

I was able to maintain my swimming and show up consistently at the gym. Two days a week for each. Nothing extreme, just rhythm. Repetition. Being consistent has been the most important ingredient in my success my entire life. 😉

Sharing that routine with my mom is special. It turned exercise into companionship, into something sustained together rather than optimized alone.

Health this was about continuity and being grateful for a body and mind that let me do the work I care about.

The last note

One more time, putting these notes together has made me aware of how many things we did and achieved during 2025. Not everything is here; I’ve left out the struggles and the moments of uncertainty that also shaped 2025, but they’re part of the context in which all of this happened.

None of this unfolded in isolation. I leaned on the open source community, the teams and people around rOpenSci, The Carpentries, R-Ladies, and LatinR, and on my family, who supported me in ways that don’t always show up in writing.

These notes aren’t conclusions. They’re a way of remembering who and what made this year possible.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I wish you a great 2026.