2024 Year In Review

2025-01-26

tl;dr - Another year without writing on my blog, but 2024 was probably the best year of my professional career. More public speaking, going much deeper into Elixir, and learning a lot about observability.

Going Deep on Broadway and RabbitMQ

The defining professional project of the year was rewriting the infrastructure to send text messages at GetThru. This was a project that was started shortly before I joined GetThru, but unexpectedly became the focus of my professional life for most of 2024. I had never used Broadway or RabbitMQ before this project. Getting a deep understanding of each became a borderline obsession at times. I should really write more about my experience with each.

While I didn’t write about them, I did speak about them. GetThru was kind enough to give me permission to speak about the project publicly. This culminated in three talk throughout the year: StirTrek in May, ElixirConf US in August, and Momentum in October.

We had initially thought we were going to launch the project early in the year. Unfortunately, we hit a lot of technical issues and the launch was delayed into the summer. We’ve all worked on delayed projects, but most people have not stood in front of a large crowd and admitted while it being recorded. I got to do that at StirTrek. It was cathartic though. Almost everybody has been on late projects. Turns out that admitting it publicly is a great way to get the audience on your side.

By the time I spoke at ElixirConf US, we had been live in production for a couple of months. The talk morphed into a sort of retro on the project where I went over various incidents we had dealt with during the rollout. My boss joked that I was one incident away from just sitting there with a glass of whiskey and a cigar while telling war stories. He wasn’t far from the truth. Causing and dealing with the fallout of incidents is a great way to accelerate your understanding of observability fundamentals and platforms.

The version at Momentum was not recorded, but also nothing of note was changed. The system has been rock solid (except for a nasty bug we introduced in our Broadway fork that I spent a couple of weeks debugging) in production. It held up under our election load without any issues. It was eerie how well it worked.

I’ve been getting paid to write software since 2007 and this might be the project I’m most proud of. It was a really good team pushing themselves to their limit of technical understanding. We all walked away with a much better understanding of the BEAM, distributed systems, and observability.

Less Speaking in 2025

I really enjoy public speaking. I do not enjoy the prep for public speaking though. Between two different versions of my GetThru case study talk across three conferences, I spent a lot of time outside of work prepping for conferences in 2024.

I ended up pushing myself too hard trying to prep for CodeMash to start 2025. I originally had a talk on Nerves accepted, but prep for that talk turned into a disaster. I put myself out on the limb of Conference Driven Development and it did not go well. Prep became a slog. Weekend and after weekend of issues that I was unable to resolve.

Luckily, CodeMash reached out about doing a second talk and let me switch instead. I ended up doing a new version of my talk from THAT Conference 2023 on building single page applications without JavaScript. The focus on was on Phoenix LiveView, but I built a demo app in Hotwire and explored HTMX some as well. Very much not impressed with Hotwire, but HTMX looks very exciting.

The fallout of that is that I’m pretty burned out on conference prep right now and am planning on taking a break from speaking for at least the first half of 2025. That has been hard. I keep wanting to submit to various CFPs I see popping up. So far, I’ve resisted. The current plan is to start submitting again for conferences in the second half of the year. I have a few ideas brewing for ElixirConf US 2025 already.

Union Negotiator

Probably the most unexpected curveball came at the end of 2024 when I joined the bargaining committee for GetThru Workers United. I grew up in a UAW home. It was a big part in pulling my family out of poverty. I never thought I would part of negotiating a union contract, but, yet, here we are.

Big thanks to those who came before on the committee though. They did a lot of the hard work. I simply came in at the end to help get things across the finish line.

Tattoos as Healing

I also finished up a full sleeve mechanical arm tattoo this year. I struggled with severe RSI pain for almost a decade before mostly fixing it with diet changes. A recurring joke with college friends was that I should just get mechanical arms. A tattoo will have to do.

As a cis white guy, this is probably the closest I’ll ever get to understanding body dysphoria. For the first month after it was finished, I couldn’t walk past a mirror and not feel incredibly satisfied and whole with the result. RSI defined my life for almost a decade. At one point, I calculated that I was spending approximately fifteen hours a week on exercises and pain management. Seeing a physical representation of healing from that was more emotionally touching than I ever expected. I felt like me. I felt right.

Big thanks to Adam France at Red Tree Tattoo in Columbus, OH. Adam is a fantastic artist and a fantastic person. He loves doing (bio)mechanical tattoos and I can’t recommend him highly enough.

On to 2025

I don’t know exactly what 2025 brings. 2024 was the first time I haven’t job hunted in years and I’m very appreciative of that. I would like to think that all the public speaking I did in 2024 will make future job searches easier, but the market is rough right now. I would not want to be trying to get another Elixir job right now.

With less speaking on the docket, I’m hoping to do more writing. There are a lot of lessons to pull out from what I built and learned in 2024.

I’m also hoping to step away from my computer more. I got back into playing some music and reading more books for fun in 2024. Hoping for more of that in 2025.