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Looking Forward - 2024 Edition

A reflection on the past year and what's next

Happy Holidays/New Year! At least for when I'm writing this. 2024 has been a crazy year for everyone (not just for me). From the X number of major political events that have been happening to the various changes that have occurred in my life I wanted to take a step back while I'm relaxing for the last week of the year and reflect on what I've done and what I want to do. Nowhere close to a New Year's resolution but more like a Retro used in Agile.

The Good

One of the first big things that comes to mind is that this marks my first full year of having a full-time job. My work at Comcast has been a great first experience in the market working with a great team and doing really cool things. Due to NDA reasons I can't disclose in detail everything I've done, but I will say that I got to introduce Rust through lab week projects that saw internal usage in the company. I look forward to working with them in 2025 on more cool things and try and push Rust usage more ;).

I also was able to work on a bunch of personal projects, most of them also using Rust (can you tell I love using that language?). Here's a list of all the projects that saw significant work, and check out the projects page for more projects.

To wrap this section off, my personal life has been great overall. I've been keeping in touch with old friends, bonding with family, staying financially responsible, and starting to watch my health and peel back bad habits from college. I even got a new computer and wrote an entire post about it. There are many positive things that happened in the past year and hope to have many more in 2025 and beyond.

The bad Not-so-good Ok

It wouldn't be fitting for a self-reflection to only mention the good things. Although honestly I don't think I have many significantly bad things to reflect on. In fact, comparing my high-school self (or even my college self) to now I've gone through many changes in attitude and process for the better. I'm in a strong place mentally, have a solid support group among family and friends, and have developed mechanisms to deal with my anxiety and ADHD. There have been low points in my mental health this year due to things out of my control influencing it negatively (primarily the "major political events"), but the support of friends and family as well as just learning to deal with my emotions healthily has prevented it from being a significant weight on my life. I cannot overstate the importance of mental health especially in this current state of global affairs.

The one thing I do want to improve is to try and reduce my "analysis paralysis." I've noticed that when it comes to anything large or ambitious I tend to over-analyze the problem space, do excessive research and jump down rabbit holes, but most of all not start solving the problem. This was especially noticeable when I started doing Advent of Code even though I wasn't trying to go for solving the problem the first; the more complicated the problems were the more I just got "stuck" before scratching out a solution. My current thinking is that I'm subconsciously using the sunk-cost fallacy before doing the work since I don't want to fail; A valid desire, but inherently the preliminary research is also part of the "sunk-cost", it doesn't make the problem go away. Going forward, I'm going to try and work on breaking the problems down first and also be more comfortable with failure later in a project as a way to tackle this problem.

The Future

There are many things I want to try in 2025. I want to do more stupid niche projects just for the heck of it, try embedded Rust with a bunch of old Arduino's and ESP32s in my workspace, play more good games, the whole list. No one knows what the future will hold but all I know is that I will look forward and embrace what's next.

Happy New Year and cheers to a great 2025!

This post of the ref_cycling blog is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0