2024 in review

I read a lot of fantasy books this year!

My favorite new series were The Kingkiller Chronicle, Gentlemen Bastards series, and The Stormlight Archive.

Customizing Neovim was fun and rewarding.

It’s amazing I got anything productive done this year…

I really enjoy working with Rust in my own hobby projects.

Types are coming to Elixir and I’m loving it.

(I recently migrated some small projects to v1.18 and found a bunch of errors.)

The Gleam programming language shows a lot of promise.

My one gripe is the pain of manually encoding/decoding JSON (even with the various libraries). Compared to for example Elixir dynamic encoding or Rust’s #[derive(Deserialize)] it just feels so bad that I’ve avoided Gleam for some projects. Shame on me?

CSS is alive and better than ever.

I quit my job and started my own company.

At the moment I’m focusing on consulting but maybe something else can grow from it one day?

I wrote 26 blog posts—it was quite a productive blogging year for me.

I built a custom keyboard together with a custom keyboard layout.

Made the eBook for Why Cryptocurrencies? freely available and finally finished the How I wrote ‘Why Cryptocurrencies?’ series.

I wrote a Tree-sitter grammar for Djot.

Finished the blog series about building my first 3D printer.

I’m up to over 2100 printing hours with the machine so it’s safe to say I’ve been using it, not only playing around with.

Rewrote my lighting home automation from Python to Elixir.

I realized that meta-blogging is a great way to get virtual points on Hacker News.

For some reason the idea of writing a fantasy novel got stuck in my head.

I had a stint where I listened to dozens of hours of advice for aspiring writers and started planning a series. The excitement tapered off a bit during the Christmas holidays and I don’t know if this was just a temporary sidetrack or if it’s something I’ll actually end up doing.

Design a one-handed keyboard layout.

Again, this was just something my brain got stuck thinking about and I’m not sure if it’s just a fleeting idea or something I need to do so I can stop thinking about it. (Sometimes just a little planning plus solving the most difficult problems are enough—I don’t have to finish all the crazy/dumb ideas I get for my mind to consider them “done”.)

Complete my second 3D printer.

There’s no point in having a single printer; what if I break it and I can no longer print replacement parts for it?

Develop my home automation system more.

I’ve got a ton of things I’d like to improve (or play around with). For instance, yesterday I received the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition that I hope works as well as advertised.