Welcome to joapen’s blog

A place where you can find a mixture of ideas, projects, experiences, thoughts and notes that I want to remind…
If you can help me, please go ahead… ideas, comments, suggestions are welcomed!

Right now my focus is: Strategy, Wardley maps and Machine Learning.

Who is behind joapen? you can find me:

I started this blog in 2007 and the content have changed in so many ways. So, depending on what you find more interesting, you can visit some of the main sections I have created or just to search on the search bar.

Project, portfolio and program management

I studied engineering and after that I decided to work on something completely different: as Lotus Notes developer. My career as developer was very difficult basically because I’m not naturally gifted to do it. All programs I have coded have been with blood, sweat and tears. The opportunity to jump into Information technology discovered me 2 things: the value of technology into society and the need to organize these initiatives, that is projects.

Project Management

Worked as project manager in 2005 and I continue learning about it.

I started with simple projects and I have increased the complexity and size of them, basically around IT.

PMO

A good project management office is gold in an organization, specially for project managers and delivery leads. Worked on this stuff during a couple of years.

Portfolio Management

Despite the formal name was other, my focus have been always to manage a set of services and projects using the theory of portfolio management, which has a lot of best practices I have learned during these years,

Program Management

Work on proposals, win them, due diligence, set up all teams, resources and manage stakeholders during all the life of a program is an exhausting and complex task that needs you to be fresh and keeps perspective every single day.

I have worked on SWOT teams at a program or contract level, and these are the most difficult and challenging ones.

Leadership roles

This is part of my duties since 2.005, and to learn about all you have to do to do it in the right way takes exposure, leadership, and a lot of attention to details. Client management, sales, business development, emotional intelligence, strategy, and so many other things.

You’ll find some posts about some of the industries I have been engaged, as aerospace, energy, engineering, manufacturing, oil & gas. You will not find anything about chemical, telecommunications or pharma, but I have been there for a while.

Practices, frameworks and standards

When I’m engaged to a new challenge my natural reaction is to listen to everybody in that new context and second thing is to study the standard framework and understand how the industry delivers and what are the recognized best practices. This way you have a good starting point when leading an initiative. As I have been pointed to many different challenges, I have study and finally wrote about some of them.

Technology

I started my career with Lotus, then I jumped into projects related to mobility, SharePoint, .NET, SAP, Salesforce, Cobol and other technologies.

I have interest on Linux, Ubuntu, , Python, Machine Learning, AWS, Hadoop, Azure.

I am engaged on Digital marketing for some years and I have learned about WordPress, Google services, Joomla, Prestashop and Zurmo.

Investment, Trading and economics

I’m not a professional investor neither a finance professional, but since I started to work in 2.000 I have invested my savings on stocks. I continue learning about it as this knowledge area is infinite and evolves very quickly. The exposure of being in the markets helped me in so many ways.

Long term investment

Every type of investment method is a trade, and there are so many styles, strategies and skills you have to learn if you want to be successful.

I’m basically a long term investor on stocks, that started with so many mistakes and that evolved to a systematic way to invest with a combination of buy and hold and Dividend growth investment.

Blockchain & Crypto

At the end of 2017 I started to look at blockchain and irremediably I finished investing in cryptocurrencies.

To be 4 hours a day, during 13 weeks investing pennies in crypto currencies pushes you to learn quickly about technical analysis and how these markets work. This have had a lot of positive contribution on my main investments.

These learnings led me to python and machine learning.

Trading learnings

Fundamental analysis, 10K reports, yearly reports, technical analysis, macro economic information, economic trends, and control your behavior is being a long journey that continues.

Portfolio management, trading strategies, market breadth and the list continues being bigger and bigger.

A friend told me I should write about all these basis and I finally did in 2019. The result is this book.

Some personal content

Sports & travels

I’ve played basketball for years, but I had to stop due to an injury. Since then I have basically run and ride.

I love to travel and you will also find some stuff about it, not so much sorry.

A mixture of things

There are random things as Time, stress, activities using my hands, learning, imagine, knowledge, summary’s tips, books I have been reading during this journey,

All random, without a clear purpose, but with a reason to me.