I've finally cleared away the bitrot and gotten this new yearly review post out. It's weirdly satisfying to tend to my little personal online space, even if only for this annual post.
Blogs I liked in 2024
Unlike this blog, there are many independent sites that publish high quality work at a regular cadence. I'm always on the lookout for more of them, but here are a few that I learned a lot from in 2024:
- After Babel - on parenting, technology, mental health, and their intersections
- Simon Willison - Still doing phenomenal work distilling the latest on LLMs
- Fernando Borretti, Max Böck - A few new-to-me programmer blogs I added to my feed list
- Front-end Front and Sidebar.io - high signal/noise link aggregators
Frontend tooling is good actually
In late 2023 I started toying with Bun, and in 2024 it became the default for every project I work on. Its speed and simplicity are wonderful compared to all of the moving parts you'd traditionally need to cobble together with Node/ts-node/Yarn/Webpack/Babel/etc.
I also replaced ESLint with Biome, and moved several projects to Vite. These tools may not have all the bells and whistles of their legacy equivalents, but they're simpler, faster, and meet all of my needs very well.
Neovim is still fun
Late in the year I rediscovered my preferred outlet for structured procrastination - tweaking my neovim config. I discovered mini.nvim and it is glorious. In evolving my setup from several old plugins to mini's modules, so far I've removed 12 plugins and several hundred lines of manual configuration, and even started my own colorscheme (I really didn't anticipate that last part). Looking forward to exploring mini and writing more Lua in 2025.
Coding in the Age of AI
Don't worry, that subhead is tounge-in-cheek. Everyone in software development wote a similarly grandiose think piece this year, so here's my take: despite egregiously overdone hype, AI-assisted coding is already very useful, and it's going to be fascinating to see how the human-to-code interface evolves over the next few years.
I started out as a pretty big skeptic. Early versions of Copilot had latency bad enough to negate the benefits of AI completions, and they were only useful about 15% of the time anyways.
But after switching to Supermaven this year I've appreciated that some kind of AI developer augmentation is not just inevitable, but kind of great. Unfortunately, Supermaven's now been acquired, so its developent seems to be over. I'd love to stay in Neovim, so I'm curious what the next wave of editor-independent AI coding tools looks like.
This is all not to trivialize the degree of social and economic upheaval likely to be wrought by these tools. I don't think it's going to be as bad as the doomers think, and for a curious and ambitious generalist, I think the future looks very bright. We'll see how that view holds up in 5 years.
A few reads I've enjoyed on this topic:
Gadgetry
I'd resisted the "wearable" category of devices until 2024, but finally succumbed to a new Apple Watch in October. Purchased to help train for a half-marathon (mission accomplished), I've enjoyed its various health-tracking functions. I was apprehensive about bringing yet another glowing rectangle into my life, but in a surprising twist, moving a subset of notifications to my wrist has reduced the frequency and overall duration of my phone use. The bulkiness and battery life of the watch are not great, but overall it's been a net-positive.
Continuing on the theme of gadgets-that-stop-me-from-using-other-gadgets, I'm now into year 5 with my reMarkable 2 and it's still going strong. Carving out the first 30 minutes after waking to journal and plan on it with my morning coffee has been a great way to start the day. I try to do as much digital reading on the rM2 as possible and it's been great to continue to spend less time on my laptop.
Books
As mentioned last year, my reading goal was to take notes and retain more, even if it meant I read less. And in fact that's exactly what happened– while I finished less than a book per week, I recorded a page of notes for 20 of them. Reviewing the notes was surprisingly helpful! I plan to keep up this practice and am now using a new template to write them up on my reMarkable. Some of my favourite reads for the year were:
- The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
- Useful Not True by Derek Sivers
- Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
- Good Inside by Becky Kennedy
- Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie
- Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
- The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
- Burn Book by Kara Swisher
- How to Know a Person by David Brooks
- Outlive by Peter Attia
- Excellent Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly
Gratitude
On a personal note, 2024 was split into 2 parts– the first of stress and anxiety, and the second of reflection and gratitude. In an increasingly uncertain world, I feel truly blessed to be healthy, safe, and most importantly, able to spend lots of time with the people I love.