2024 — Year in review
Another year in the books, another chance to look back at the highlights and reflect!
Projects
I've been working on a handful of projects over the course of the year:
- Since March, we've been renovating our new house. In the early days this took the form of me going in and removing many of the fixtures that we didn't want anymore (carpets, wardrobes, cabinets). But then quickly grew in scope as we discovered things like lead paint in the walls and no insulation in anything! So as most projects go, we estimated a few months™ to get it all done, but we are just now getting the framing for the new bits in (and it looks amazing).
- I also built a small (now retired) Rails project to watch any RSS feed and publish new entries to anywhere else around the web (like Mastodon, Bluesky, as a webhook, or as a HTTP call). I mainly wanted to see what Rails was like in 2024 — I'll save you the project, it's still hard to break free of the Rails Way, but things like Stimulus and Turbo are nice additions.
- To help my partner stay on top of her ever-growing sewing pattern collection, I built her PatternMate. It really only does the things she wants and works how she does with pattern organisation, but we figured there's likely at least one other person out there that works the same, so it might be of benefit to release it — and we avoid the 90 day ticking clock of internal TestFlight releases!
- Lastly, over the last few weeks, I have been rebuilding the backend of my blog (the one you're reading now) with the plans of making it available to the public as grouse.site! Thankfully, Hanami 2 has made this super easy. I can just pull out the core slice and build an admin UI and any public facing template bits around it! The main thrust around keeping the site compatible with the micropub spec, is that I really like writing in markdown for a number of reasons. I have a local backup, and I can use whichever native writing tool that I feel like. But I still wanted a stellar admin UI to be able to make smaller edits, or write shorter-form posts. Anyway, there will be a more detailed post on this in the future, so stay tuned!
Media
2024 has been a good year for music!
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released another new album, and also live streamed a bunch of shows on their North America tour. Not all of them were recorded, but this one was an absolute banger — if you have a spare 3 hours.
"Tyler, The Creator", "The Cure", "Jack White" and "Jamie xx" have all released amazing albums that have remained in my heavy rotation this year.
A new Diablo IV expansion released, which was fun to play through, but became repetitive and not super rewarding once the end-game began.
The Rise of Golden Idol is probably my game of the year. I really enjoyed the first one, and it turns out that deductive problem solving is kinda my jam, so more of that is always welcome!
Of the films I released this year, a couple stood out: - Dune: Part Two — Who doesn't love a good space opera? - The Boy and the Heron — The latest (and last?) from Hayao Miyazaki. This has all the trappings of a Ghibli film — ✅ World war, ✅ quaint rural setting, ✅ sick / dead mother, ✅✅✅ a heartwarming story that is beautifully animated and told. - The Iron Claw — technically a 2023 release, but we only got around to watching it a few months ago, and it needs to be called out. You'll laugh, you'll cry, it'll change your life.
Work
This year I spent the first 6-8 months as a Team Lead (Engineering Manager in the common parlance), leading a team to stream (in as close to realtime as we can manage) the core bits of data that our product offers to other parts of the org. Up until now, things had been largely trapped in a monolith's datastore, meaning people had to come to us and connect to our database to get the things they wanted. This made upgrades and schema changes tricky. But with a shiny new data product in play, we can now start the work transitioning other teams in to the new world and free up our poor database!
During those 6-8 months, I realised that Team Leading wasn't entirely for me (I am squarely pointing the finger at Jira for making this an absolutely soul sucking experience). I love managing and supporting the people in my team and helping to set the direction we take to tackle the problems at hand, but making sure that Jira always reflects the current state of play was taking away my will to live. So I made the move back to an individual contributor role (whatever that means) — and I still mentor and manage the people on my team, but have someone else doing the Jira wrangling. This also means I get a decent number of hours each week to also get on the tools and write code again :D
Family
A massive year for our little family this year! We grew from 2 humans and 2 dogs, to 3 humans and 2 dogs. We finally outnumber them!
Late in October, we welcomed Sebastian in to our lives, and he has been a napping, smiling, farting pile of joy since then! The ~3am wake-ups are all worth it when you get to see this mug staring back at you.
Misc
I wrote a while ago about some of the tools I have been trying out this year. Some of those have stuck, other have not.
I have gone back to Safari, because I just can't live without iCloud tabs.
I have also been trying out Wezterm over Alacritty, but now that Ghostty has hit 1.0, I'll be giving that a whirl!
Zed has remained as my editor of choice, especially now that the ruby-lsp works really well.
My main computer is now just my M3 Max MacBook Pro — I haven't needed to turn on my gaming PC in over a year! The GPU in this thing has more than enough power for the games I am looking to play.
I've been really enjoying the workouts that Fitbod puts together. That in combination with some of Apple's cardio workouts has been keeping me active (aside from the dog walks) while we pack up our old place and head to a place closer to a gym!
Tags: retrospective
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2 Comments
@daniel You inspired me to try The Case of the Golden Idol with Felix last night – lots of fun (and hard)!
29 December, 2024
@maxwheeler it is such a fun game — some of the later puzzles are maddening because all the information is _right there_ but they want you to piece it together in obtuse ways ????
29 December, 2024