2024 Year In Review

January 1, 2025 11:55am

Reading Time: 8 minutes

It’s a few minutes to 12:00 PM on the 1st January 2025 when I published this. Thanks to time-zones, that means it’s just about to turn 12:00 AM one hour to the west of Greenwich, meaning that it’s still 2024 in much to the west of the prime meridian. So I’m technically still within the window of time where I could say I got a year in review post out for 2024.

Turns out it’s not the first time I’ve used this excuse. Looking at other posts I’ve published on the 1st of January, I’ve done this twice before. And I guess this pattern of posting a year in review on the first of the next year makes some sense: it’s usually a quiet day, with nothing open, and I’m usually a little tired and listless¹.

That means there’s usually a large block of time available to me, and despite what I wrote yesterday, it is a good practice to do some reflecting, however brief it may be.

So I’d figured I’d might as well drag iA Writer out and scribble out a brief review of the year that was.

Online Presence

I made a point of wanting to cut down the number of domains I acquire in my year in review for 2023. This is still an ongoing progress, but year-on-year, I’m down 2 domains on net, which is an improvement. 2024 saw the acquisition of 7 new domains, of which 2 I’m using for something, and 1 I plan to keep around:

Domains	2024	2023
Registered	23	25
With auto-renew turned on	17	16
Currently used for something	15	13
Not currently for something but worth keeping	2	3
Want to remove but stuck with it because it’s been shared by others	0	1

I’m still trying to keep this blog alive by posting regularly here. I’ve must’ve felt more comfortable with doing so as it’s been a record breaking year, with 840 posts, beating the previous record by 594 posts. The initial fear of falling out the practice has subsided to one where I find joy in posting here. That’s probably why the post count is so much higher.

Of course the quality of a blog doesn’t correlate with one’s ability to “post the most”, and I do feel like there have been times where I felt a little blasé about what I write here. I do want to be better here, or at least be a little more conscious about it. But not at the expense of turning this into solely a soapbox/marking/punditry site: there’s plenty of those out there already. So you’ll probably continue to see the cringey, irrelevant, lame, and potentially disposable posts here. I’ll just try to make sure that it’s balanced out with posts that are actually good.

Some notable posts of the year:

Detecting A Point In a Convex Polygon: the subject matter is a little dry, but one thing that’s notable about this one was the interactive elements. This took a few weeks to get right and I’m quite happy with how they turned out.
Goland Debugger Not Working? Try Upgrading All The Things: notable as it seems to be the post that got the most traffic from Google.
BASIC.HTM: notable as it was the first post of mine that appeared on Hacker News.
A Tour Of My New Self-Hosted Code Setup: longest post to date, with probably the longest bit of spoken audio I’ve published on this site. Getting my hands dirty with editing the narration was an interesting experience.
Micro-fiction: Get A Horse: notable in that this was my first post that was a work of fiction.

One other thing about blogs: I still have that wandering eye for other blogging CMSs. I did start three other blogs, of which two I shut-down and rolled into this one. That just leaves one new blog created this year that I’m planning to keep separate, mainly because I feel the subject matter warrants a dedicated site.

Projects

2024 didn’t feel like a big project year, probably because most of the projects I’ve started I kept to myself. But I did manage to release a couple this year:

Sidebar For Tiny Theme: This came with the additions for recommendations to Micro.blog, and the addition of sidebars listing those recommendations in a couple of the themes. I use Tiny Theme, which didn’t have a way to do this, so what started as a blog-post eventually became a Micro.blog plugin. It’s been good seeing this adopted by other bloggers.
Cyber Burger: A Pico-8 game, which I hoped would’ve only taken a few weeks to build. Overall it took 3 months, largely because I spent large stretches of time not working on it. But I’m glad I actually got this finished and released.

The other things I’ve worked on that I built mainly for myself:

UCL: A tool-command language, similar to TCL, that I’ve built for work. The state of this is smack-bang in the middle of “sort-of-usable” and I’ll need to spend some effort cleaning this up and documenting this if I ever want this to see wide release. I’m not sure that I want that though. at least not yet.
Blogging Tools: A set of tools that help me post here. What started as something to assist with making photo galleries has grown to a suite of tools dealing with images, audio and video. Really useful for my needs.
Tape Playback Site: A private site for browsing old cassette tapes that have been digitised. I still have a pile of tapes I need to digitise though (are you getting a sense that I find it hard to finish things? 😀).
Nano-Journal: My version of Kev Quirk’s web-based journalling app. After adding Git synchronisation and attachment support, I’ve use this now for all my journalling. It doesn’t do everything that Day One does (off-line support’s a big one) but it does enough.

Finally, some of the projects that have been abandoned:

Photo Bucket: My third attempt at making something to publish image galleries online. I think the need for this has been made somewhat redundant with Blogging Tools.
I also started two interactive fiction stories in Evergreen that I haven’t finished yet. One is close, and I probably should get it done. The other is about halfway finished and probably won’t see the light of day.

Books And Media

Given that I exceeded my reading goal for 2023, I thought I could push myself a bit more for 2024 and go for finishing 10 books. Sadly, I was nowhere near meeting it. I only got to finishing 4 this year:

(not pictured: Twenty Bits I Learned about Making Websites)

I think I probably started more books than I’ve finished. Not that I have to finish every book I’ve started, but I think my problem is one of focus. The books I have started could be interesting, and I have plans to finish some of them. I just need to spend more time reading.

I’m not a movie person but I did manage to watch a few this year. Here are the ones I’ve posted reviews for:

There was a period of time where I felt burnt out by scripted TV shows, favouring YouTube over much else. I eventually got back into watching a few “high production value” shows, some of which I enjoyed:

And some that I enjoyed far less:

Onwards To 2025

I know it’s cliché to look back on the last year and feel pretty crappy about it. And yeah, not every day of your life is going to be great. They’ve been some rotten days in 2024 that I haven’t included in this review (I have written about them so check out the archive if your curious).

So, was 2024 a good year? Well, I’ll start by saying that it hasn’t been wholly a remarkable year. There’s no one event that I can point to and say “this is what made 2024 great.” Maybe this past year was like that to others, but such events didn’t happen to me². And recency bias has made it difficult for me to say there were more good days then bad (the last few months have been rough).

But I wouldn’t say 2024 was a bad year. Certainly a busy one, with a lot going on. But on balance, I’d say it’s been one of the better ones.

So that’s it, year in review for 2024 done. Have a happy new year and onwards to a great 2025.

I don’t do much on New Years Eve, electing to go to bed early. Yet, I usually get awaken at midnight for various reasons: fireworks, messages from people wising me a Happy New Year. Last night was no exception. ↩︎
Well, that’s not entirely true. Becoming an uncle was an example of such an event. But again, such personal news, is currently outside the scope of this post. ↩︎