Year in Review 2024

I did my first Year in Review last year and have decided to carry on the tradition to make sure I know what I did!

I've written about themes before, so I won't go over it again here. Below is a high level of what my 2024 themes were

Overall my themes were pretty successful. I do wish I had been a bit more mindful, and am now left to wonder if I shouldn't have gone with Autumn of Mindfulness instead of Fall of Mindfulness, because I seem to have taken a step back on some of my hopes for mindfulness 😄

Professional

Last year I said

In the moment it can feel like I don't really get anything done at work

I've felt this way pretty much every year for probably since I first became a manager, but I'm starting to embrace it a bit more as I get older I guess.

For some context, in 2024 I worked 2235 hours with the following breakdown:

Category	Hours	Percentage
Administration	1193.5	53.4
Meetings	838.1	37.5
Coding	93.5	4.2
Conference	55.5	2.39
Commuting	54	2.42

There were a couple of highlights from work this year though that I wanted to call out

I celebrated 16 years with my current employer which means that my career is now old enough to drive in the US!

My team finally was able to migrate our SQL Database version control from Subversion to Git. I wrote about the migration to git last year in my year in review and this was the last project that needed to be migrated over.

There are still some things to do to help with the migration to make it easier for the teams that work with this project, but the first couple of steps have been completed which is nice.

One of the big things I wanted to focus on was the validation issues that my company had with transmissions of claims data.

Working with a couple of smart and dedicated people we were able to do some pretty amazing things.

One thing to keep in mind with the validation errors is that they have to be corrected, by a person, in order to allow the claims to be transmitted to the Health Plans (which is a major goal of my company)

At the start of the year, the validation error rate for Institutional Claims was 13.7% while the rate for Professional Claims was 8.7%

By the end of the year those rates were down to 1.1% for Institutional Claims and 0.3% for Professional Claims. This represents decreases for 89% and 96.4% respectively.

I'm really proud of what the team was able to accomplish.

Personal

Health

I usually like to run or walk to keep my cardio health up, but I seemed to keep running into one injury or another with my knees, feet, ankles ... whatever. In July I decided to give swimming a try.

Since July 15 I've swum 83,650 yards / 76489.56 meters ... which is 47.5 miles. This absolutely blows my mind because my first swim was only 200 yards, lasted about 10 minutes and I thought I was going to die.

I'm now consistently swimming 3 days a week for about 55 minutes and 2000 yards / 1828.8 meters.

At about the same time I really doubled down on starting a meditation practice. I tend to do about 20 minutes of meditation each day. In 2024 I had 54 hours of meditation.

I wish I could split up my walking and running statistics, but Apple doesn't think these are different and so they are combined in all of the health apps! My combined Walking+Running stats came in at 1015 miles which looks like a lot, but is down significantly from my high in 2019 of nearly 2000 miles. It's also the lowest annual total by far since 2015 (my first full year of tracking)

I think I know what I'll need to focus on in 2025!

Writing

In June I started a writing group with Mario Munuz and Trey Hunner and that helped to keep me motivated and accountable for writing. I didn't write nearly as much as I hoped, but I was able to get out 18 articles. This is the most since 2021 when I wrote 23, but about 1/3 of my high mark in 2018 when I somehow was able to write 44 articles!

Open Source

This year I expanded the role I had in the Django community and I'm really pleased with that.

I started the year off as a Navigator for the amazing Djangonaut.Space program in Session 1, and was able to fill that same role in Session 2.

I joined the Django Commons admin group with Daniel, Lacey, Storm, and Tim. We've been able to onboard 6 libraries!

I also gave a talk at Django Con US in Durham titled Error Culture. As always, my time at DjangoCon US was a blast and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in 2025 in Chicago!

I also ran for the Django Steering Council. I wasn't successful in making it into the Steering Council, but the five folks that did are all amazing humans and I'm looking forward to the work that they'll do over the course of the 6.x series.

I've also really enjoyed Jeff Triplett's Office Hours. I don't do nearly enough open source work during those office hours, but it's nice to see people and listen in on, and participate in, some great conversations. I'm looking forward to doing this again in 2025

I've also been trying to attend the DSF Office hours hosted by Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Thibaud Colas. These calls are really interesting and allow a bit of a peek into the DSF Board and what's being worked on. Again, I'm excited about attending these in 2025 as well.

Sports Fandom

I post on social media a lot about Hockey. Specifically the local team near my home, the Coachella Valley Firebirds.

They made it to the Calder Cup Finals again this year. And again they played the Hershey Bears. I wrote about the 2022-23 season, and the Calder Cup finals and the heart break associated with losing in Overtime in Game 7 of a championship. I wish I could say that they were able to redeem themselves, but the outcome was the same ... but losing in 6 games instead of 7. That being said, it wasn't nearly as painful this time around.

In all, I went to nearly 50 Firbirds Hockey games (a few on the road, but most at home) and can't really believe it. Watching Hockey live is a lot of fun!

One of the highlights of the off season was running into a few of the players at a local sandwich shop and getting to chat with the captain Max McCormick. I tried to 'be cool', and I think I might have mostly succeeded, but it was a pretty surreal experience.

I also had the luck to get tickets to a game at Crypto.com arena to see the LA Kings play the Seattle Kraken (which is the NHL affiliate of the Firebirds). It was an awesome game to watch due to many of the players for the Kraken being former Firebirds.

The Kraken ended up losing the game 3-2 but it was still a great time.

Finally, the BIG sports win this year was the Dodgers winning their first Full Season World Series since 1988. Because of life I didn't get to watch as many games of the World Series as I would have liked, but I did get to watch game 5 and that made up the missing game 1 ... I think.

Miscellaneous

Music

I got to see a few Concerts in the Park which is always fun. It's free, and typically a pretty nice evening on some cool grass with a stunning view of the sunset over Mt San Jacinto.

I also got to see Weezer and had a good time hanging out with my daughter.

Finally I rediscovered the amazing music of The Tragically Hip from a toot by Greg Wilson and it's brought me a lot of joy to listen to them again. Phantom Power is my favorite album of theirs with so many good songs. Bobcaygeon is probably my favorite on the album, but it can change depending on my mood.

Empty Nesting

As I wrote about here my daughter graduated from High School and started College in the fall. This has been a big change for my wife, Emily, and I. Our daughter is pretty close by so we can visit easily, but we've tried to give her the space she needs to adjust to college life. It's been pretty successful, but it's still a weird experience to walk past her room and not see her.

Home Garden

I've been posting pictures of my lemon tree on Mastodon over the last year. In November I was finally able to harvest about 30 or 35 lemons. The great thing about a lemon tree is obviously all of the lemons. But the hard thing about all of the lemons is trying to figure out what to do with them.

Emily found a great recipe for Lemon & Chili infused Olive Oil so we used that recipe to make about 12 bottles of our own custom olive oil and about 15 cups of Lemonade. These made some pretty amazing Christmas gifts.

Reading

Looking back at my reading for 2024 and I didn't do nearly as much as I would have liked, or think that I should have.

I was able to make it about 8 Chapters into Software Design by Example. It's a great book, but it's definitely not something you just breeze through.

I was able to finish up Practices of the Python Pro. I found it to be a pretty comprehensive book. I'm not much of a book reviewer so I won't bother writing one here. I got value out of reading it, and I think others will as well.

What I am really missing from my reading list for 2024 is fiction. Like any fiction at all. It doesn't look like I read anything that wasn't technical so I'll be trying to focus on fixing that in 2025

Wrap up

Overall 2024 was a pretty good year for me. There were some things that I wasn't and am still not excited about, but I have decided to try and make things better where I can, stand up for what I believe is right, and just keep on trying to be kind and make the world a better place in the ways that I can.

This post is part 2 of the "Years in Review" series: