It’s incredibly hard to believe that 2024 is already over. It’s felt like both the slowest and fastest year ever.

Similarly to my recap in 2023, I’ve got about an hour and a half to recap it until midnight strikes here, so let’s boogie.

Work things!

Whew, ch-ch-changes! I am now Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub. I didn’t think I’d be here one year ago, but life happens!

At the beginning of this year, I was CTO of a small startup, building an app that we ultimately open sourced. I did a more in-depth recap of that here. Long story short… we just couldn’t make it work as a sustainable business. Our team is a group of awesome people, and we stayed friends! All of us are working on different projects and different organizations now.

So, when we said goodbye, I took a little bit of time to interview, do some freelancing, work on projects, and speak at events.

One of the contracts I worked on was such a cool company that I can’t talk about because they’re in stealth, but at a high level, I got to build an app that customized physical goods! I had the creative freedom to build it from scratch, so I used Astro, React, and PixiJS for it. I learned a ton and I’m hoping to open source at least some aspects of what I was able to build someday.

In person, I spoke at Front-end Design Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, The Merge in Berlin, and Figma Config in San Francisco! It had been a while since I had spoken at most in-person events since I had a baby last year, and it was really fun to see old and new friends and talk about cool things.

While I was at these events, I got to talking to a few folks more seriously about roles I was interested in and applying for, and very long story short, several humans and rounds of interviewing later, I joined GitHub in September! It’s been really cool so far. I wrote a short post at the 2 month mark there and a lot of what I’ve seen has been holding true. It’s an unusual company that feels both small and large at the same time, has massive impact, and really deeply cares about enabling developers to build better. So far, I’ve gotten to speak at GitHub Universe during the keynote and the livestream, and at Microsoft Ignite during their breakout sessions and CIO Summit, and I worked hard with the team to launch the free tier of GitHub Copilot as well as the new OpenAI o1 model in Copilot (which, by the way, I was proud to be able to get some cheeky commentary in that o1 blog, if you wanna check it out).

Anyway, it’s been quite the year for the full-time job side of things, but I’m happy where I’m at there.

Outside of that, I’m still advising companies, but a little bit less admittedly while I get my footing still at GitHub! I finished up with Netlify and Chainlink, I’m still working with Plasmic and The Sukha Company, and I took on helping Convex as well! This year has been so weird for startups. So many companies have either restructured, or shut down, or laid folks off, or gone stealth, or pivoted. It’s been really interesting to be a part of that as a participant and a witness, and I’m hoping that hiring in the tech industry gets stronger and stronger in 2025.

Personal things!

It has been such a good, growing year. I spent a lot of time learning, and being with family and friends!

On the learning side, I took voice lessons for the first time, and Korean lessons! Learning with a teacher (rather than doing something self-guided) always produces good results for me, and I too often don’t take up the opportunity to learn with someone (specifically on things outside of tech). It was really nice to make a change in that regard this year and have some fun doing it.

As a side note, learning-wise, it has been absolutely incredible watching my toddler learn to speak more and more this year. Language development in toddlers is truly fascinating and humbling. A year ago she couldn’t even walk, and now she’s babbling in English and Spanish and Korean without breaking a sweat, and switching between the languages depending on who she’s with. I am truly in awe!

We traveled a bunch this year as a family, in the U.S. mostly to Seattle and Florida to visit family, and then all the way across the world to Singapore and South Korea for family weddings and vacations! It was very challenging to do the international trips with a toddler who can walk and does not want to be contained (I recommend traveling if you have a baby between 6-9 months, where they eat solid food but can’t go anywhere, OR later when they know how to sit still). Anyway, it was wonderful all the same to see so many people.

Our community here in Chicago is really great. It’s kind of hard to explain it. We’ve figured out, somehow, how to have friends as adults (some with babies, some without) who we hang out with regularly! They can drop in on us and we can drop in on them, and they’re from all walks of life and places around the country and the world. It feels like the community I had in college, which I really didn’t think I’d ever have again! It’s genuinely changed how I live day-to-day, and improved my mental health, and that’s been amazing. I don’t take for granted how uncommon it is to have this opportunity to have… a village of people, for lack of a better way of phrasing it. If you take anything away from this entire post, it’s that you should reach out to folks to hang out more, open your home to people, cook with people, do hobbies with people, and get to know folks you wouldn’t normally talk to on a daily basis. It’s worth it!

And of course, outside of Chicago, my internet friendships are going strong and I love you nerds. You are definitely the ones who actually read what I write here, heh. I’m so grateful to all of you being there, in 2024 and beyond!

Okay also one last note, fully buried the lede: I’m pregnant again, AHH. Baby #2 due in the Spring! I do not like bring pregnant. But, this time around, I have experience, and just knowing what to expect this time has made all the difference! I know there’s some pregnant folks out there now who occasionally read my stuff, and I want you to know: you aren’t alone, and I’ve written a bunch about it here on this blog too if you want more reading (or you should DM me if you want to talk)!

Side project things!

This year has been pretty fun for my projects!

First and foremost, my weekly newsletter is going strong! We crossed the 7th year anniversary this year, and it is still my biggest labor of love for the tech community. I tried a few things that didn’t scale this year to improve both my subscriber retention/experience and also my personal workflows, and it seems to be going well. I’ve been using a sales team for some sponsorships, and I admit it’s going okay in that regard (figuring out the balance of quality and quantity and maintaining relationships has been weird, not bad, but definitely a learning experience), and I’ll be experimenting with that more in the new year. This month we crossed 17k subscribers, and I would love to hit 20k (purely for the fun, round number) in 2025, but I know that’s a big leap so we’ll see how far we get!

I worked pretty hard on my game Jumblie for the first half of the year, and I finished making puzzles in October. I already wrote about why I finished in the link in the previous sentence, but long story short: it was really fun, and it almost got acquired even, but it was way too time-consuming and took a lot of time away from my other projects. But, I’m glad I did it, and I still play it regularly (and you can too)!

I also shipped my first paid app called W-9 Crafter this year! I wrote about how I built it, and it’s been a pretty low-maintenance one to have around. Long story short: it generates W-9 forms for you. It’s a glorified button. “It does what it says on the tin,” as one of my internet friends says. It’s saved me a ton of mental overhead when I need to give a newsletter sponsor or contracting org a W-9, so I’m proud to have it shipped purely for my own selfish purposes, and it makes me happy to see others using it, too!

There’s way too many projects of mine waiting in the wings to be released (which I have blogged about), with domain names fully purchased and implementations halfway done. I’m hoping I can actually ship some in the next year before the domains renew, but we’ll see about that!

I did have a goal this year of blogging more, as well, and it worked! I more than doubled my number of blog posts this year (I did 68, including this one)! I probably spent as much time blogging as I did on making very tiny improvements to my blog, but I have really enjoyed it and plan to keep it up in the new year. You can read “meta” posts about how I build my blog here, and my blog template is open source if you want to use it to make your own! I also built myself a digital typewriter to help with blogging, and I’m still absolutely loving it.

And finally, not really a side project but I’m including it anyway, I’ve been actively playing go almost daily! It’s something I’ve done for several years, and my strength there has plateaued a little bit (…I should probably get a teacher, wow, full circle), but I really love it. There’s a local go club in Chicago that I try to visit on occasion and it’s really been a treat to play whenever I can.

There’s probably more that I worked on, I know I’m forgetting something, but this blog has gotten long enough, let’s get on with it.

Phew!

With all that, adios 2024. It’s been a year of big ups and downs and changes. Last year I predicted it would be full of “funky transitions” and past Cassidy was spot on. Maybe 2025 will stabilize? Maybe I’ll actually use some domain names? Maybe I’ll just be happy to sit still on occasion? Who knows.

Thank you for reading all of this! Here’s a joke for you as a reward: What’s the best thing about elevator jokes? They work on so many levels!