2024 Year in Review

My 2024 in review

I haven’t published as much on this blog recently as I’d like. I’ve been hard at work on a few new projects, and I’ve been open-sourcing some projects like my aiwriter.

But I like yearly reviews! I’m going to do a proper one privately, but I wanted to share a few things I liked about this year.

Big picture

The best part of my year was traveling to Japan. It was an incredible trip. My wife and I went around Japan for two weeks. Japan itself is awesome. We loved it. But more importantly, it reminded me that making a choice of who you’re going to spend your life with is crucially important. And I nailed it.

We were gone for a long time - I wrote about it here. Over the past few years, we’ve traveled a lot. We’ve been away from home for roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of the year every single year since the COVID pandemic ended. As we settle in to our house (we’ve owned it for two and a half years now), I’m starting to feel the pull to stay here more. I’m planting a garden (literally planting roots not metaphorically) and enjoying being here and seeing the seasons change. So we’ll probably do less travel next year.

Health

I didn’t do a great job with my health this year. I was at the gym a decent amount of time, but my eating habits have been off. My big plan for next year is to radically change my body composition, starting in the kitchen. At the beginning of the year, I had lost 30 pounds using a GLP-1. As soon as I got off of it, I gained the weight back, and I also ate terribly. I’m going to invest more time in cooking food at home and hitting the gym hard.

I’m really excited about this, actually. I’ve always loved cooking, but I am finding a new dimension of it when I can incorporate local meats and veggies from my meat market and farmer’s market. I want to reduce our dependency on the local grocery store and grow as much of our own food as I can. I’ll be starting a veggie garden this year!

Work

I built a lot of awesome stuff this year. I’m enjoying building with AI. I also got caught up with what’s new in React - many of this stuff was covered in this blog this year.

At the end of this year, I think I found a pretty good groove of making videos and content for Cloudflare, while getting to build side projects and explore ideas in my free time. I have one large side project I will pick up next year, but not in a “work 80 hours a week way” - I want to use it as a way to explore AI agents and automation to build a legit side business. More on that soon!

Writing

I wrote on this site a ton! Doing a rough count, I published about 60 blog posts this year. I covered a lot of topics, and I even rewrote the site in Astro, which set me down the path of working with Astro at my day job too.

Here’s some of my favorite posts I published this year:

Home

I love our home. This year, I’m taking the first steps into making it a bit more of a homestead versus just a house. As I mentioned, I’m planting veggies this year, and I started an herb garden earlier this month. One of my side quests this year that I’m extremely excited about is starting an apiary - I’ll be setting up my first beehive in April/May.

Pride in ownership is something that is disappearing in the world. People don’t own houses! I’m really fortunate to have a house and I want to do my best to improve it and make it awesome.

Conclusions

Overall, it was a good year. I’m going to do a more in-depth private review - it certainly wasn’t perfect - but I learned a lot. I’m excited to continue writing on this site in 2025 and keep learning more next year. Happy 2025!1

Footnotes

  1. And if you’re actually reading this - happy new year to you! May God bless you and your family. ↩