2024 - A Year In Review

1st January 2025

This year has been a strange one for me. I’ve been thinking it over and I honestly don’t know if it has been good or bad. Maybe it’s just been meh. It’s been a year of some good things but also a lot of nothing.

Some positives:

• I turned 30. My fiancée gifted me my new macbook. This was amazing, I’d been learning on a 2011 macbook pro until then and this macbook is like a different world. It’s a lot of money and it I really felt that I was taking a bet on myself and working towards my goals.

• Time away. Work has been stressful this year. So having some lovely breaks away has been wonderful. A peaceful trip to Wales where I sat and watched the clouds for hours on end was the highlight of these.

• My fiancée. She’s truly wonderful.

I haven’t managed to do anywhere near as much as I would have liked to this year. Time has seemed to fly by, I don’t even know where to begin. How is it that I’m almost 31 when only yesterday I turned 30… I had a lot of plans and goals this year that haven’t worked out. I’m not going to be hard on myself about this, looking back now I can see how I had very lofty goals and not nearly enough free time to achieve them.

The year ahead

This year I want to focus on smaller, more attainable goals.

• Sleeping. I want to get better sleep. I think I’ve probably averaged 6-6.5 hours a night this year. I’m permanently knackered, some people can get by on 6 hours or less. I’m not one of those people. I would like to get a solid 8 hours asleep every night.

• Coding. I want to code as much as I can. I had 131 contributions to my Github last year. This isn’t an accurate record as I don’t also work on stuff that’s on Github but it’s a reasonable indication of roughly how much I have done. I’d like it to be higher this year. I’m also planning to keep track of how long I have spent coding on a spreadsheet or something this year. It’s not overly me but we’ll see what happens.

• Publish an app. This is a big one for me. An app on the app store. It doesn’t need to be paid, it doesn’t need to be a new SAAS. An app I made, available to download for the public.

• Contribute to open source. Another big one for me. I’d love to contribute to something this year.

• Drink more water. Simple but something I struggle with.

• Social Media. I want to engage and post more but equally spend less time doom scrolling. Finding the balance will be important.

Are these smaller? Who knows? Will I accomplish them all. No, probably not but that’s okay too. As long as I do my best then I can look back on the year and see progress then I will be happy.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a wonderful year!