2024 in Review

I’m extremely jet lagged, so it has only just occurred to me that it’s New Year’s Eve. But I want to write some quick thoughts while it’s technically still 2024, as I have a lot to be thankful for.

Christmas

I’m jet lagged because we just got back from a 3 week trip to Düsseldorf Germany. We rolled into town this morning around 4:30 AM, and nothing about this makes sense to my body right now.

We were in Germany to visit my brother and sister-in-law. They’ve lived in Germany for nearly 10 years and I’m embarassed to say that in all that time I haven’t gone to visit them, as they’ve always come to visit me. Previously my brother had lived in Shanghai and I always regretted not visiting him there either, as I don’t think I’d ever be able to experience that place the same on my own. So, a trip to Germany was long overdue and in order to make the most of it we decided to make it a big trip and we went for 3 weeks which I’m pretty sure is a vacation record for me.

We stayed on the top floor of a 4-story walkup, which really helped burn off the Christmas market treats. Speaking of which, the famous markets were a real highlight and something we were excited to see. Our AirBnB was right next to the major Christmas market that cut through downtown and we visited it probably every day. My son, who’s now a very rambunctious ⁵⁄₃ year old, developed a serious addiction to the merry-go-rounds which were everywhere during the trip.

It was really nice to have so much time to see my brother. And Germany is a wonderful place to spend Christmas with a toddler.

New Job

I started off the year unemployed, which was a happy-bummer. It was nice to have a few-months break after wrapping things up at Orion last year, but it’s hard to enjoy the time with the uncertainty hanging over everything, so I started interviewing after about 2 months of break time. I was extremely lucky to land something quickly, given how bad the job market has been in the Bay Area lately, everything just lined up perfectly with an old aquaintance who had the exact job description at the exact time for everything to work out. The secondary benefit here is that I loathe interviewing, and this worked out on the first try.

The job is with AuditBoard, where I’m now Director of Engineering leading a few small teams on the backend (and frontend, I guess, naming things is hard). The people I work with are really fantastic, and I somehow managed to have all of the strongest engineers in the company working under me with some very big engineering challenges for them to tackle.

AuditBoard was acquired on my 3rd day at the company, which is a record for me. It was a bit of a bummer for me personally due to my short tenure, but it was a huge deal for some of my colleagues who’ve been there a much longer time and it’s genuinely nice to see folks get a big exit after putting in so much hard work. We’ll see how things develop under the new PE ownership.

Coding Again

I don’t really write code at work anymore, especially at my new job. So this year I’ve been trying to make a more concerted effort to write code on a regular basis to keep my skills fresh (or, at least, fresher). That includes this blog! I’ve been squatting this domain for about a decade with the intention of hosting some kind of blog here, but this is the year I finally did it and I’m pretty proud of that even if the readership is a rounding error on zero.

I’ve been following the developments with machine learning very actively since about 2017 and it’s been amazing to see how quickly the technology has progressed. This is an area where I’d like to continue to focus my personal development efforts, and I have some interesting side-projects in the back of my mind for next year!

Health

I had a serious health issue earlier this year. There were a few scary test results, but overall pretty inconclusive. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again, but it was an unwelcome reminder that I’m getting older and need to start taking my health more seriously in general. I’ve been able to lose a bit of weight this year, but I’d really like to continue that trend into 2025 to lose substantially more, and also find ways to be more physically active than I’ve been the past few years.

2024

It’s weird to wrap up a whole year in one page of text, it feels more eventful than this short description can capture. Nevertheless, this was a year of big changes with a new job and lots of side projects being worked on. And I was able to finish the year with a really special family trip to Germany. I have a lot to be thankful for looking back on the past 12 months, and I’m quite excited for what’s coming in 2025!

Happy New Year.