2024 Year in Review

I know that they say time flies by faster as we age, but this year I’ve noticed it to be true more than in recent memory! For my yearly review, I’m once again attempting to highlight major changes or areas of focus in my life, instead of doing a chronological review of the past year.

As was true last year, very little has changed in my personal life this year. I am continuing to attend the same LCMS church, and have begun to get more involved as time goes on. I have picked up a couple of new personal projects that give me a fun diversion on occasion, which includes expanding my work on my family history, and beginning to digitize old family photos and videos. Both will continue throughout 2025, with the digitization process being one of my biggest goals to spend time on in the coming year.

In my professional life, my job has largely remained the same, though I would say my workload has increased some. I’m still in the office 4-5 days a week, though I could dial that back to 3-4 if I really wanted to. A lot of my job continues to include interacting with team members across multiple departments, which is often made easier by being in person, instead of relying solely on Slack conversations or Zoom meetings.

Over the course of 2024 there have also been a number of personnel changes at work that have affected me to various degrees, with two of the departures being individuals whom I’ve worked with for years. It has taken some adjustments on my part to get used to them no longer being present in the office, and along the way I’ve also had the opportunity to take on some roles that are continuing to challenge me!

Throughout 2024 I’ve stuck with my primary laptop being a Mac, although I’ve used my Linux laptop and desktop a little more in the past few months as well. I continue to try to choose cross-platform tools when possible that allow me to work seamlessly on whichever computer I feel like using, and I’ve been looking at a few alternatives to Apple-based tools, specifically photos. I’ve been using Immich for a while now as a backup solution, and have begun experimenting with it being my primary photo repository, instead of relying on Apple Photos for everything. The jury is still out on if I’ll fully embrace Immich, but so far I’m really liking it.

My note-taking/PKM and task management setup have largely stayed the same throughout 2024. I’ve tried OmniFocus 4 a few times, but have always come back to Todoist for tasks, which I think boils down to ease of use and cross-platform ability. For notes, I’m still using Obsidian, and I honestly haven’t looked closely at alternate options much. I’m fairly happy with the overall abilities, and for the same reasoning as why I’ve stuck with Todoist… Obsidian is insanely powerful, and works well across multiple platforms. I do wish it was a little nicer on my phone, but I normally only glance at notes there, and don’t do heavy editing.

My reading took an even bigger hit this year than last, though I’ve yet to put my finger on exactly what the reason was. I had at least one two-month period where I didn’t complete any books, and a few other near-month-long stints. What I was doing, I honestly don’t recall… I know that I’ve struggled to spend as much time reading in the mornings as normal, largely due to being distracted with other projects and ideas. My goal is to once again increase my reading rate in the year to come.

In website news, I’ve stuck with Hugo, though over the past few months I’ve made a fairly large number of changes, starting with the overall design. By early November I was tiring of the theme that I’ve been using, and so I made the switch to my own fork of the Bilberry theme. The change in themes also gave me an opportunity to add a new status update content type to the site, which in conjunction with Robb Knight’s Echofeed is allowing me to attempt POSSE, where I post updates to my own site, then syndicate them elsewhere (currently only Mastodon, but I’m experimenting with Bluesky as well).

I also migrated my website’s hosting from DigitalOcean to AWS (more on this at a later point, I think), and have successfully run that setup for over a month. DigitalOcean was a great way to start out, but I was running into some limitations in their app platform approach based on what I wanted to do with this site, and it gave me the perfect excuse to play with AWS a bit more as well.

I originally intended to post weekly on my website throughout 2024, though by mid-Spring I had fallen off the bandwagon, and my approach just wasn’t working. This caused me to pause posting for a while, though I began adding new posts again in the fall as I began spending more time with the site overall. I haven’t decided if I want to attempt a post a week in 2025, though I definitely do want to continue to increase my writing output.

And thus concludes my 2024 year in review! I continue to thank God for all the blessings of the past year, and I look forward to finding out what is in store for 2025!

Happy New Year!