It's time for another self-indulgent end-of-year post, isn't it?
2024 was weird. I finished a few things, won some battles, but looking back it feels like another year of soul-crushing defeats and soul-sucking uncertainty.
In no particular order, or rather deliberately mixed up:
Good: I built an MVP of Late Mate, my most full-stack project to date. I ended up clean-slate designing a light sensor, a mixed analog/digital PCB, an enclosure, writing embedded Rust, figuring out USB 2.0, writing a CLI to talk over USB and update the firmware, running statistical analysis of the measurements, making a landing, recording a video, giving a few lightning talks, and doing cold B2B sales.
Bad: I hit a dead end on the physical design of the MVP and need another iteration, but at the same time I ran out of money. Turns out, trying to bootstrap a project but not making sales is a good way of running out of money, who knew.
Ugly: draining savings only to fail at sales is not good for mental health.
Good: A few things I wrote (about RP2040 and bufferbloat) were apparently good enough to hit the top of the HN front page and stay on for days.
Bad: I don't write nearly enough.
Good: I recorded a talking head video of myself for the Late Mate landing. It was a little personal win, getting comfortable with video of myself.
Good: I got much closer with a few friends.
Good: I found a few communities that I enjoy a lot.
Bad: I've been a cunt to too many people.
Good: I had my shortest ever (successful) interview with tldraw, loved working with them, and learned a ton about leadership, making products, marketing, and building communities from Steve and the team.
Bad: we had to part our ways.
Ugly: a work relationship you emotionally invest in not working out is not good for mental health, even when there's no one to blame.
Good: the orbit around tldraw is full of people who ship, and it's infectious. I did reassess my engineering perfectionism, and I keep reminding myself how shipping a half-baked thing is infinitely better than shipping nothing (even though there are caveats).
Bad: the road to shipping more feels infinitely long.
Good: a number of books and many more conversations later, I have a passable understanding of nuclear deterrence. All in all, it's probably the world's least understood topic relative to its importance.
Bad: I haven't passed the knowledge on yet in any significant way.
Ugly: I suspect that a significant part of why I'm fine thinking about something that grim is the trauma of the Russian attack on Ukraine.
Good: I launched twiceaday.club in a few weeks and learned quite a bit more about production Rust, images, SVG, Rust ORMs, maps on the web, and Bluesky in the process.
Bad: it took a few weeks. I should've shipped faster.
Good: I met a bunch of very cool people.
Bad: We didn't stick together.
Ugly: It's largely my fault, not being interesting enough and not having the emotional resources to develop the relationships.
Good: I found a fun contracting gig, working with LLMs, natural language processing, and data engineering.
Bad: it's a contracting gig.
Good: I finally went through a legal name change and the bureaucratic hell that is renouncing a citizenship. My country of birth can fuck off.
Good: I had my first proper, if only a week long, vacation in years. Malta's lovely!
Good: I picked up foil fencing, an incredibly fun and engaging sport. Not going to lie, I wanted to try in large part because of the ridiculously cool gear (swords? crisp white top and bottom? breeches? sign me up!), but now I love fencing for the combination of physicality, strategy, and mind games. Truly a full-body sport that doesn't skip the brain.
Good: I started lifting semi-regularly. Both this and the previous point are very good for mental health.
Good: I got my weight mostly under control and lost nine kilos.
Good: I got involved in local politics. Canvassing and observing elections is fun!
Bad: entrenched NIMBYism is REALLY frustrating.
Good: I've been to my first Edinburgh Fringe. It's insane. Never before have I seen a dance so abstractly beautiful it made me cry.
Ugly: a thug broke my partner's face when we stopped a theft. The Met have done fuck all in six months, even though they arrested the guy on the day.
Bad: my career is a fucking mess, and a startup lottery ticket I bought with seven years of my life is not a winning one.
Tallying all that up, I guess the year could be worse.
2024 was definitely better than 2022 and 2023, which were largely filled with depression, burnout, and guilt. But it also could be much better, and for now, in my mind, the setbacks overshadow the good parts.
Onwards to 2025, whatever it brings!