Year in Review 2024

Introduction

Year in Review posts are my public end-of-year self-reflections. They are mainly written for myself: I like to make notes of what has been going on in my life and I really enjoy looking back at the older ones since it’s so easy to forget.

To prepare for these, I use a really cool booklet called Year Compass that provides nice prompts to take a look at the previous year and plan for the next. This year a new thing I did was I kept writing Month in Review notes on the last day of each month. That made remembering the full year much more vibrant and I can highly recommend.

Spoilers: 2024 was the fifth bad year in a row.

Previous years

I’ve been writing these since 2016!

What I hoped for 2024 last year?

I set up four main goals for this year.

First, I’d like to find a job I can thrive in. This year especially was quite a rollercoaster in work life and had me spend way too much in self-doubt as I failed in not just one but two jobs in the same year.

Yeah, that didn’t happen. It’s been a rough year. There were a couple of jobs that I was really hopeful for and felt would have been real good match but got rejected even before interviews. But for the most of the year, there were no relevant open positions even available. I kept applying for all sorts of jobs across Europe with no luck.

Honestly, this year has really tested me and made me question whether I have any employable skills even anymore. If someone would ask me now what it is that I’d like to (or could) do, I really don’t have an answer. I want to build communities and I think I’m rather good at it but it just feels like those jobs don’t exist anymore.

It has also made me question my choices earlier in my life: if I just had stayed in one place doing software development for the past decade, maybe I would be in a different place right now. Of course, all of that is just the self-doubt seeking to cause havoc and I wouldn’t trade any of my experiences away.

I’ve been brainstorming recently on redesigning juhis.dev into my professional site and making it hyper-focused on my skills in community building, development education and technical writing.

I did work for a short 3-month stint as a full-stack developer at Yle and loved working with the team but unfortunately in this market situation and with the government’s push to cut Yle’s budget there was no option to stay.

Second, I want to build archipylago into a lovely, warm and welcoming Python community for everyone interested in Python in Turku area.

With our first year with archipylago done, I’m giving myself full marks for completing this goal. There’s still a lot of work to be done to establish the meetup and spreading the awareness so we’ll reach all the Python developers in the area. But our 7 events this year were real good, a lot of people joined, we all learned a lot and made a lot of new friends.

Most importantly for me, hearing the feedback from people that we’ve succeeded in making the atmosphere in events lovely, warm and welcoming gives me confidence that we have a solid foundation on top of which to build for the future years.

I want to read more and actually finish some books. So I’m setting a goal of 10 books (and I count finishing that Becky Chambers book I’ve been reading for a long time).

I still didn’t finish The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (that I started in summer 2022…) but I did read more than 10 books. I mostly read non-fiction as I found those easier to read. Jimmy Carr’s Before and Laughter was a great biography by one of my favourite comedians. Derek Sivers’ How to Live and Anything you want made my summer commutes more interesting. Austin Kleon’s Show your work and Keep going gave me new ideas and perspectives to sharing my work and experiences.

On the fiction book side, the best book of the year was by far Kaliane Bradley’s wonderful The Ministry of Time. It’s a sci-fi book where most of the world building happens through interactions between people pulled from the history to modern day and their handlers.

All in all I finished the year with 13 finished books.

And to continue improving as a writer, I want to write 100 blog posts + newsletter issues in 2024.

Last year I finished with almost 100 so for this year, 100 sounded like a good round number to aim for. I ended up with 146 blog posts and newsletter issues spread amongst this blog, archipylago blog and Syntax Error newsletter. In addition to them, I wrote daily Advent of Code explanations so the total score is somewhere around 170 published pieces.

31 posts in August for Blaugust did a lot of heavy lifting there. Being unemployed and having a lot of time to think, read and write also helped.

Three out of four goals achieved sounds very good on paper but in a way I failed the most important one and the one that causes me the most stress and practical problems on day to day life.

I also wrote

The start of 2021, 2022 and 2023 have all been under horrible circumstances but going into 2024, I’m actually feeling great and even more optimistic than usual.

That optimism didn’t turn into a good reality unfortunately.

General thoughts of 2024

Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, it feels like everything has gone down the drain and everything I’ve tried just fails miserably and 2024 wasn’t an exception to that. Throughout the spring I still maintained certain optimism but there was none left for the autumn.

As I went through my monthly recaps that I wrote at the end of each month, there were two common things throughout the year:

1. Anything job hunt related is failing and life sucks.
2. Community stuff is wonderful and brings a lot of joy to me.

And the world news weren’t helping at all either. So much horror around the globe and a lot of it knocking at our doors as well.

Writing

I published a blog post or newsletter issue every single week of the year. In fact, since July 12th 2023 I’ve been consistent with my weekly blog! All in all, I had a fantastic year with my writing as I already went through in my goals section.

For the second year in a row, I reached a Diamond Rainbow Award in Blaugust when I wrote daily blog posts about what I like about Python’s standard library. I also joined IndieWeb Carnival and participated most of the months this year, including hosting the festival in May.

Here are my favourite posts from 2024:

• Debugging Python (Jan 2024)
• Talk ideas for new and experienced speakers (Feb 2024)
• Chesterton’s Fence and tech documentation (Mar 2024)
• Traveling through time (Mar 2024)
• It's my first time at a meetup - how does it work? (Apr 2024)
• The nook of creativity (May 2024)
• Third places and meetups (May 2024)
• What does it feel like to read RSS feeds? (Jun 2024)
• Home-cooked, situated software (Jul 2024)
• Parsing nginx server logs with regular expressions (Aug 2024)
• Do one thing well and communicate with others (Sep 2024)
• How I take work notes as a developer (Oct 2024)
• How I teach Eleventy from scratch (Nov 2024)
• Advent of Code Digital Garden (Dec 2024)
• Hallway track is where the magic happens (Dec 2024)

Communities, events and speaking

Community activities were the saving grace of this year. I don’t know how I would have coped throughout the year without all the amazing people I got to hang out with in our communities.

With Turku ❤️ Frontend we organised 9 regular meetups, a student night and a Code in the Dark event. With archipylago we organized 4 meetups and 3 sprints. We also organised Future Frontend that was a great success and I got to finally meet face to face many people I had earlier only known in the virtual realm.

At Koodiklinikka, I ran the fourth çommunity salary survey with over 700 respondents and I did some hype work and software projects for NHL Bracket Challenge (which I won) and IIHF World Championships challenge in the community.

Due to unemployment, I didn’t get many opportunities to travel and speak in events compared to the previous years. I gave a couple of talks in our own meetups in January (both about debugging). In February I talked about Eleventy and Global Data Files approach to building community sites in THE Eleventy Meetup and about hobby projects as a tool to land the first developer job for Hive Helsinki students.

In March, I sat down with Mike to chat about what personal web means to me in What the Jam podcast and followed that up in April with a panel discussion. During the summer at Yle, I gave a company internal talk, a version of my Contemporary Documentation talk.

In October, I talked about why developer should blog at Aurajoki Overflow which sparked a lot of nice discussions and I’ll be delivering the same talk early next year in another meetup.

I stopped writing for Syntax Error after July as I felt I didn’t have good enough ideas to continue writing about and partly because I failed to really get it off the ground in the first year and a half. I did end up writing an extra newsletter in December to share Debug December Christmas calendar.

At the end of last year, Cristián shared in Mastodon how he had started tracking how much time he uses towards his community work. That inspired me to start doing the same and I did a good job tracking until July and then during the summer when very little happened, I fell off the habit and forgot to get back to it in the fall.

But I can do a bit of interpolating from the first half of the year to estimate that this year I spent roughly 300 hours building Turku ❤️ Frontend, archipylago and Koodiklinikka – and it was worth every second.

Projects

Software

235

235 has reached quite nice stability as the only two updates this year were replacing Arizona Coyotes with Utah Hockey Club and one bug fix to fix how goals are calculated for individual players. It’s been in heavy use all year long.

hamatti.org

I kept developing this website throughout the year. In January, I added a workaround to support heading level 4 with Notion. In February I added some IndieWeb inspired stuff with search, Webmentions and microformats. In March I made the website more print friendly in case someone likes to archive my blog posts on paper or read them in paper while sipping hot chocolate in their reading nook.

In June, I worked on improving the tooling to run this site by building a CLI tool to manage my related posts feature. I also took inventory to make sure I know where my external dependencies with this site are and what the worst issues would be if they would disappear.

config-renderer

One of my new projects this year was a Python CLI tool that I built to make documenting configuration files easier. It also worked as a motivational starting point to get my dotfiles in order. I haven’t written about it yet but I spent a good chunk of time in the fall creating a repository to store them and use GNU Stow to sync them from repository to actual use.

Two small hockey projects

In the spring, the NHL playoffs and IIHF World Championships kept me busy. For a few years now I’ve maintained an improved UI for the NHL Playoffs Bracket for our community and for the world championships I built a quick tool to keep track of the scores for our community competition.

Pokemon apps

I kept my Pokemon TCG Card Viewer Firefox extension and Gym Leader Challenge Decklist Validator updated as new sets arrived but didn’t do any major feature development as they pretty much work as needed.

I kept working on an unpublished Deck Builder for Pokemon TCG as I was frustrated with the official builder in Pokemon TCG Live. I use it for all my deck building needs myself but it’s not quite production-ready or polished yet and I keep hoping the folks at twinleafs publish their project at some point and that it would come with a deck builder better than mine.

Advent of Code

Advent of Code was another highlight of the year. I continued my tradition of solving the puzzles in Python and writing educational, blog-style explanations. To add something new to the mix, I decided to make them into a digital garden that included the explanations but also all the other notes I made during the puzzle solving to inspire others to take notes and show how to get started.

Stardew Valley Mod Manager

One of my December projects that I started but did not yet finish is a Stardew Valley mod manager that I’m building with Electron. I reached the “works for me even if clunky UX” state within the first weekend after which my productivity dropped a bit but I’m planning to wrap it up in early 2025.

It allows enabling/disabling mods (or groups of mods), updating out-of-date mods and installing new mods. I’ve always found the mod management with Stardew Valley to be a bit too cumbersome so I decided to solve it myself. Keep an eye on the blog to see when it’s ready to be shown to th

Movies, games, books, podcasts and so on

Oh boy. I gotta tell you: when you’re unemployed, there’s a lot of time at hands to play games and watch movies and tv shows.

Games

I played around 70 different games with the usual suspects from previous years topping the play time lists: Stardew Valley (Steam Deck), Slay the Spire (Steam Deck + a bit on Switch), NHL 21 (PS4) and Pokemon TCG Live (Mac).

All together I played almost 800 hours on Steam Deck, PS4 and Switch + a bit on iPad and a ton of hours of Pokemon TCG Live that I have no stats for but I play it pretty much every day.

Last year, the choice for game of the year was easy with Tears of Kingdom. This year though, it’s way harder. I didn’t play a lot of new games that were published this year. Two Zelda games are good candidates: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom gave us the opportunity to play as Zelda finally and the fan game The Legend of Zelda Dungeons of Infinity (can’t link to because Nintendo’s lawyers have been aggressive) was a brilliantly made roguelike.

Poke Rogue is another fan game that deserves the praise. It provided a new approach to Pokemon games and as a massive fan of the franchise, I fell right in.

I played a lot of Katana Zero as I got inspiration to start speedrunning it. I played so much of Into the Breach and Shogun Showdown that my wrist almost gave up and I had to stop. Balatro was addictive as heck. News Tower was the most anticipated of this year’s games and I played quite a lot of it in February but it didn’t quite carry over to the rest of the year.

Portal: Revolution was a very well made full-game mod for Portal 2 that was true to the original feel and style but breathed fresh energy to the series.

As I didn’t travel almost at all this year, my gaming habits were also significantly different from last year. My Steam Deck was pretty much docked on my desk for most of the year which lead to me playing more strategy games than platformers or adventure games.

Due to the unemployment, I played 83 hours more on Playstation. Good 127 hours of that went into NHL 21 and I replayed Far Cry 5 and 6 couple of times this year. The top 3 remained exactly th same with roughly similar shares of the playtime. On Steam Deck, I played almost 150 hour more than last year and 100% of my Steam gaming was Steam Deck this year and I barely even opened Steam on my Mac at all.

What surprised me a bit was that 16% of my Steam playtime went towards games released in 2024. I expected it to be much lower but I guess Balatro with 6% share did a lot of heavy lifting there as my fourth most played game.

Movies and tv shows

As I spent most of the year away from the streaming services, I didn’t watch that many new things. Instead, I watched a lot of old favourites again.

Some mentions still of things I enjoyed. The Lazarus Project was a nice time-travel scifi show. Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist was a great series and its spinoff Christmas movie Zoye’s Extraordinary Christmas was an okay Christmas movie but suffered from what all spinoffs suffer that it felt it was just made to have a long theme episode of the show and it didn’t lean heavily towards the strengths of the show.

Billy and Billie was a fun one! I had completely forgotten it but going through my notes I realized I binged it in April and enjoyed it a ton. UFO Sweden was a fantastic Swedish sci-fi movie! Godzilla Minus One was one I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did.

Where the Crawdads Sing deserves a mention too, a fantastic movie. A couple of British mini-series that made my summer commute much more enjoyable were Six Four, Nightsleeper and Red eye.

In addition, I once again loved the British comedy/quiz/panel shows and their spinoffs like Only Connect, Taskmaster (UK, NZ, Australia, Norway, Jr.), Richard Osman’s House of Games, Would I Lie to You and 8 out of 10 Cats.

Books, podcasts and other media

I already talked about the books earlier in my goals section.

On podcasting front, I didn’t pick up many new ones. My favourite again was Tom Scott’s Lateral podcast which is a game show about lateral thinking. I continued listening to a bunch of great Python podcasts that I wrote about at the beginning of the year. Elisa Heikura’s Koodarikuiskaaja podcast was a must listen every time a new episode arrived.

One special mention goes to Nina Conti whose ventriloquism act I had seen a few times but after I saw this hilarious bit of her monkey hypnotizing her during the act, I became a massive fan and binged through hours and hours of her acts from standup gigs to Youtube series and morning TV guest appearances.

And as the year was almost ready to be wrapped up in the history books, Matt D’Avella launched Three Rules, a podcast with 15 minute episodes where Matt invites guests to talk about their rules for success or happiness. The first episodes have been absolute bangers as is expected from Matt.

What’s up with 2025?

Last year I discovered my goals quite easily but this year hasn’t been as easy.

I want to become a better writer. I haven’t quite figured out the metrics for that yet though. It’s hard to know if my output improves in quality. Over a lunch with a friend, we brainstormed this a bit and one outcome we came up with was to write more long-form stuff this year. Something akin to a book - but probably not an actual book.

I would also like to take another round to explore newsletters. I love the format of a newsletter: it’s more direct in distribution than a blog; its regular publishing schedule and fixed format also make them interesting to me both as a reader and as a writer. One day I’d like to discover a way to make a successful newsletter as pretty much every one I’ve tried so far has failed to reach audience. Syntax Error was one of the better attempts but that never really picked up, plateauing around 300 subscribers almost immediately and then I ran out of ideas for what to write as well.

Over the Christmas, I also got an idea for a programming education piece that I’d like to explore in 2025.

And sure, the main goal of 2025 is to find a job. But I hate setting up goals where the outcomes are not in my hands. I can do things to increase the odds but eventually, getting hired is in someone else’s hands and if those hands are not kind, I cannot reach the goal. I don’t have particularly high hopes about 2025 either since the market hasn’t shown much improvement towards the end of this year.

If I think about the communities I run, they are pretty much in good shape and I’ll keep running them for years to come but they are also reaching the limits of what makes sense in terms of growth or doing more. They need to be at a capacity where they can be run whilst doing everything else in life so I can’t go overboard with them just because I now have more time. I also don’t want them to end up in a situation where nobody else would continue after me because the amount of free labour is too much.

I also want to have more good discussions with people. To experiment with that, I’ve crafted and designed a year-long project. I want to keep the details still secret but if I succeed in sticking to it, I’ll write about it in-depth towards the end of 2025.