Year in Review: 2024

2024. What a year. I worked, hung out with my family, I moved house (again), I travelled, read a load of books and did some 3D printing.

The year seemed to start off quite slowly with work but it picked up quickly. I ended up delivering training every week from August. As well as training, I published two new courses with Pluralsight and am working on a third. I recorded some YouTube videos, delivered some video content and workshops for a startup client and, alongside Ben Patton, I’ve been working on Local First Academy.

I did try to be more deliberate in collecting data through the year but I’d like to gather more data in 2025 to be able to note progress going forward.

Training Delivery

The year started off a bit slowly but on average I delivered two courses a month. July through November were a bit busier with 6 seperate deliveries in August.

Almost all deliveries were delivered remotely. There were 5 delivered in-person - in Geneva, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester.

On average the deliveries were three days in length - with a few one days and a few five day deliveries.

There was a wide spread of topics delivered. All either in web development or data processing and visualisation.

Video Content

I created two video courses for Pluralsight, uploaded some YouTube videos to my own channel and created video content for Budibase.

I recorded my first Pluralsight course on “Communication Patterns in Microservices in Node.js”. This took a while to record but it was a lot of fun to dive into and seems to have been well received.

The second course was on “Building a SPA with Angular and Spring Boot”. I taught a few Java and Spring courses this year so that was a nice overlap.

I recorded a number of YouTube videos on Fastify and a few more generic programming videos. In the coming year I’ve got a lot of local first content planned and I’d like YouTube to be more of a focus.

Books

I read a lot of books this year. There are two caveats that are worth mentioning.

First, I haven’t included a lot of technical books I skim read when preparing curricula. So, while it might look like I haven’t read a lot of non-fiction or technical books, I buy a lot of them and skim read them - pulling out useful examples for courses. They don’t get logged in my spreadsheet though.

Second, I haven’t differentiated between books I read with my eyes and my ears. I know this can trigger some people but I think that listening to audiobook is just as valid as reading. My son is one of the people who feels the need to correct me with this but I’m standing by my convictions here. I think partially because I grew up with a lot of blind family and they read with braille. Is reading with your fingers less valid? Anyway, I digress.

I read 108 books. Here’s a wordcloud of the genres:

There is a lot of fantasy and science fiction. I like these genres a lot but reckon I could do with exploring different fiction genres and more focused non-fiction. Most books were read in a few days but some were a good bit longer.

I read through the Hugo reading list and realise that the books I’ve read this year have largely skewed towards more recent publications.

I think I would like to try to step out of my comfort zone a bit more in 2025 and read some older books.

Fitness and health

I didn’t do a lot of recording on my health and fitness statistics. I started the year wanting to lose 10kg and was variably committed to this target.

I’ve yet to find something that I can stay committed to. I go to the gym for a bit, get distracted or bored and do something else - walk, run, boulder, cycle. Nothing seems to stick. I’d like to sort this out for 2025.

In terms of eating - I’ve been trying to eat a sensible default for breakfast and lunch with more freedom at dinner. I’ve largely managed to keep an eye on calories but my downfall is snacking on sweets and chocolate. I’d like to improve this in 2025.

Conclusion

Having data is helpful as I look back but I think I could do with more data to be able to see progress. I’d like to collect more data in 2025 and see if I can make more progress in my goals.

Saying that, I don’t know what those goals are so working those out is probably a better place to start.