A short recap of what I've been up to these past two months

Since May I’ve decided to go part time at my current job.

I made this decision for several reasons, the main one being getting some of my time back. It wasn’t an easy road to choose, not only because of the economic uncertainty of this period, but also because of the psychological pressure of having to make the best use of this newly gained freedom.

The first few weeks were about evaluation, thinking, research. A rollercoaster of very strong, conflicting emotions. There were evenings when I felt like the strongest person in the world, and days when I could barely bring myself to turn on my laptop.

Finding a balance again after years of being used to work hasn’t been easy, and I don’t think I’ve fully found it yet. What I have (re)found, though, is a part of myself that I thought I’d lost.

The Victor who’s ready to jump blindly into a new adventure.

In the past I’ve often thrown myself, at the expense of a calm and boring reality, into challenges that others judged as “crazy.”
At 19 I moved to Sardinia, at 23 I left a permanent job for an internship, at 27 I was between Chicago, Cincinnati and Atlanta following projects for Ferrero.
At 32, though, I realized I was fading out, that the spark that once pushed me out of my comfort zone and to start over from scratch had been left behind.

So here I am now, with a freelance project underway (the first wave shipped last Monday!), with legs sore as usual from climbing crags and mountain hikes, and with the drive to keep pushing past the limits I’m overcoming every day.

Projects & Automations

Together with a friend, I’m working on a project for a chain of spas, where we’ve built a set of automations to reach out to both warm and cold leads through an AI agent that not only handles the customer from the first message all the way to booking confirmation, but also stays in touch with reception staff and escalates specific cases to them (allergies, pregnancies, any kind of party or celebration). This gave me the chance to study and apply RAG techniques, agentic automations for handling customer questions and bookings, and real time multi channel updates for every lead.

The tech stack is made up of:

• n8n self-hosted: where the automations and workflows live
• Spoki: a wrapper on top of Meta’s APIs that we use not only for chat management but also for marketing. A big added value is that it lets operators check in on and take control of chats, replying in place of the AI agent
• Pinecone: vector database for RAG, holding knowledge used to give context to the agent’s responses
• Google Suite: read nodes and sheets that let users log lead context and get real time updates on bookings

This project has meant a great deal to me. Not just for the skills I’m picking up or the new line of business I’m getting exposed to, but because it’s my first project as a freelancer. Managing to find an opportunity like this in such a short time helped me rebuild trust in myself and my abilities, and it was also a really strong push to commit and start over in completely new contexts.

We launched at the first location last week, an incredible win and a huge sense of satisfaction. I can say with confidence that whatever the future has in store for me, going part time was the right call. On top of that, we’ve already been asked to roll this solution out to the other locations too, so wish us luck for what will be months full of debugging, new features and satisfaction!

Hikes & Bouldering

I’ve covered a lot of ground these past weeks. From Val Maira to Valle Stura and up to the slopes of Monviso, I’ve been treating my eyes to the wonders of the mountains.

I’ve also started climbing a few crags in the province of Cuneo. For now my level is still entry level, I still have to deal with vertigo on top of the effort of climbing itself, but the satisfaction that grip on the rock gives me is truly incredible. As soon as I close out a few more routes, I’ll share the results with you!

Books, Music and emotions

As I mentioned before, this new freedom, in this particular moment in history, has confronted me with some very complex reflections about myself and the world around me. Finding the energy to build a present different from the usual is extremely hard, especially given the reality surrounding us, the difficulties we face every day and the grayness of the future ahead of us.

To clear my mind, alongside climbing and days spent out of the house, music and books are my best travel companions.

I’m finishing up The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson, which I’d strongly recommend to any fantasy fan and beyond. A wonderful world, as fantastical as it is human, has been keeping me company in the evenings, and I almost hate to know I’ll soon finish the saga’s last book. I find Sanderson to be one of the best writers not just at creating characters with complex, nuanced emotions, but also at building magic systems that are extremely satisfying and interesting.

Other books keeping me company these days are Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which I occasionally open to a random page and read an excerpt from, and The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin, a book that’s helping me rediscover the joy of creating and sharing.

The soundtrack of these last two months, meanwhile, has been made up of Elephant Tree (a great groove/heavy metal discovery), Title Fight (emo/post-hardcore), a lot of electronic music from Arkasia to Ceri Wax, and in the last few weeks a lot of R&B, Funk and Soul.

Closing

If you’ve made it this far, first of all thank you for your time. I hope my thoughts and words have been pleasant company. I’m still figuring out what I want this blog to become, and I think the best way to do that is to publish, publish and publish some more. If you’d like to chat, you can find my Contacts here.

That said, I’m off to drink my herbal tea and go look for a new laptop to buy, since mine needs replacing.

Thanks again, and see you next time!