From Latin America to UAE: My Personal and Professional Journey in 2025

Introduction

2025 has been a year of growth for me in every sense, both personally by emigrating to a new country, and professionally, where I have achieved several important goals that have contributed to my growth as a Software Engineer. In this article, I want to share the highlights of this 2025 and what I accomplished—not to boast, but so that in the future, I can read this and remember how this year felt.

United Arab Emirates

Undoubtedly, the most important change on a personal level, which also fostered most of the professional growth I experienced this year, was emigrating to the United Arab Emirates with my wife. This represented a 180-degree turn in my life, moving from a third-world country (for the record, a country where I was always happy and capable of doing whatever I set my mind to without depending on anyone) to an elite country in every sense. This allowed me to move into an environment where, literally, there is no ceiling, and the limitations are set by you, not the environment you are in. In the Emirates, together with my wife, I have lived through incredible experiences, some of which I share below:

Abu Dhabi Mosque

Dubai Aquarium

Atlantis Aquaventure Waterpark

Yacht Trip through Dubai Marina

Teddy Swims Concert at Coca-Cola Arena

AWS

On a professional level, I have gained significant experience working in the cloud, primarily with AWS, where I managed to obtain three associate-level certifications this year. In this post, you can find the details of the three certifications and my recommendations if you want to achieve something similar.

Important: Real experience is not gained through certifications, but through daily practice and solving real-world problems. Regardless, certifications are valuable in my opinion because they force you to study topics you might otherwise ignore, and they allow you to make better decisions due to a stronger theoretical foundation.

For next year, I would like to obtain a professional-level certification. I haven’t decided which one yet, but I will most likely choose the DevOps Engineer Professional.

GitLab

Another professional decision I am most proud of was actively contributing to GitLab. This decision has benefited me in several ways, including:

• Networking with highly capable people in the software industry.
• Applying my Golang knowledge to one of the most widely used platforms in the global software development world.
• Learning Ruby, a language I wasn’t familiar with and which is the primary language at GitLab.

In addition to these advantages, I had the honor of being named a GitLab notable contributor in the 18.5 release, and I earned 2nd place in the final Hackathon of 2025, which fills me with pride and motivates me to keep contributing in 2026.

If you are interested in contributing to Open Source projects, I recommend reading all the articles I’ve written about GitLab as they have a very well-thought-out contribution process and it is a fascinating project.

For next year, I would like to continue contributing to GitLab and also contribute to other Open Source projects—specifically, starting a personal project that can help the developer community.

Until next year

In summary, 2025 has been an incredible year in every sense, full of learning, experiences, and achievements both personally and professionally. I am very grateful for all the opportunities I’ve had and the people I’ve met along the way. I hope 2026 is even better and that I can continue to grow and learn in all aspects of my life. See you next year in another post like this summarizing the highlights of my 2026. Happy New Year!