2024 in retrospect

Please note that content warning is warranted. The year was good, but I touch unpleasant subjects. O tempora!

I have never done a retrospect here. I’ve made the rookie mistake of writing (or even having) plans for upcoming year, but that was futile. Now I don’t even plans of dinner. So, even though mistakes were made in the past, this time I am armed with experience and only looking back.

Let’s start with my personal life. I don’t write about it often, as it’s trespassing on the lives of closest to me, but I think they’ll allow me to indulge myself here. It’s also a subject I don’t particularly enjoy thinking of, not to even mention writing about. The last few years of my life were centered around two things: my wife’s cancer and my son’s developmental problems. I think I’ll write about what king of toll being a cancer caregiver takes, but that’s not the day. Today is a happy day, as both of those things are doing great… or terribly, depending on who you ask! My wife is now 6 years after initial treatment and still in full remission. It’s crazy expensive (we are raising funds for continuous treatment!), but she beat all chances and prognoses. Not only is she still alive, but her cancer has not shown any signs of returning. Similarly, my son (who was born prematurely) is beating all his problems like a champ. He struggles, but all signs point toward him needing only some extra time to catch up. Being a father of prematurely born child is a horror show on it’s own, but none of the worst cases materialized. I am also not showing no bigger problems, though it is time to do something about my cholesterol - it’s elevated and I’m almost 40, so it’s time. I have been diagnosed with asthma, but it seems I had it my entire life. All in all, my personal life is as good as it could have been. I was not expecting it to be as good as it is, but panic attacks still happen, and dreams often become nightmares.

In other side of my personal life, my father passed away. We had complicated relation, and I still don’t know how I feel about his death. Another subject I don’t want to pollute this happy site with.

Work-wise, well. I was not laid off, which is an accomplishment in 2024. But what have I done? On one hand, I have not much to show. I enjoy it, I like our product and my team - which is always great. I also don’t have much stress - which is extremely great. Just think: I could have ended in something like Netflix! I would have had heart attack by now! I have also delivered some small projects which was a lot of fun. Recently, I’ve added plain-text transactional emails to one of the subsystems we own, which brought a huge smile to my face, even though I don’t think any client will notice. It was a rather a case of thing I wanted to do to make the product (and the web) better.

But more important things come from years of introspection. I’ve been a software engineer for 10 years now (in the same company btw!), ever since I’ve changed fields from semi-manual labor. After this 10 years I think I start to understand what kind of software engineer I want to be. I am glad I work on the backend (I like Ruby more and more), and I love that most of my work can be done using terminal and Emacs. I don’t care much about new technologies, even if some say it’s professional suicide. What I care about it simplicity and stability. And even though we work with Kubernetes running on AWS, I think my little world allows for that. I have yet to be forced to do anything with GenAI, and somehow I managed to leave a small crack in our “local” development environment which will allow me not to use docker. What I add to the plate is a different mindset, as I am an outlier. Unique doesn’t always mean good, but I think in this case it does. I’d love to have some more cool projects shipped under my lead next year, and there are signs for that. What I’d love even more would be if I believed in the product side of the project - but that also looks promising.

Money is between those two areas. Funny, how swiftly priorities shift when health problems arise - and I don’t even live in the US! My mental state requires me to have a significant buffer of rainy day founds. If my wife’s illness returns - it will be expensive. If my son’s problems get worse - it will be expensive. If my CEO gets the crazy idea of mutating my position into some GenAI investment - there will be no income. I need to have a dozen or so months of normal expenses secured, and my earnings allow for that. Guess this is why I look at apartment prices with laughter (1,5mil PLN for 70 meters? This stopped being funny some half a mil ago.), as I can’t add a huge liability. This is also why I’m delaying purchasing a real computer for months, even though I really-really-really want to have full FreeBSD compatible desktop. My job allows me to save a not insignificant sum, and this is what allows me to sleep at night.

Sadly, the IT business is going in the worst direction, but I’ve already written about it. As a counter measure, as I still love computes, my spare time is split between just few things. I hack on this site, I use old tech (FVMW! Emacs), I interact with like minded folks online (IRC, Mastodon). I love you all - the people I social with, and you who read this via web or RSS. I have also started my first true open source project - Chotto, and it should be usable in a month or so.

A good year is a boring year. A great year is a very boring year. I look at future with growing distaste and huge amount of panic. 2024 has bean a good year, as nothing bad happened to me or the closest to me.

Here’s to another dull year!