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2024 in review

4 min read

I started the year with a residual flu carried over from the previous year, still trying to solve some Advent of Code challenges (the first time I participated).

I continued the trend from previous years when I started revisiting the basics of programming, spending some time learning and coding with LC-3 assembly and a bit of C.

In 2024, I spent a considerable amount of time on various code challenges and several DSA courses. Yes, I was grinding LeetCode and HackerRank for fun. This year I will try to invest more time into actual side projects.

GitHub activity

JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
1098 contributions in 2024
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At work

  • Still working on the same knowledge sharing Angular app, the project is growing (but also aging), and it is amazing to witness it all firsthand
    • Stack hasn't changed one bit, it's mostly just Angular (TypeScript, RxJS, ngrx)
    • Helped develop some more wonderful features with IBM Carbon Components
  • Worked on two new CKEditor 5 plugins, migrated several legacy plugins from older versions, so I had to maintain feature parity despite the differences in the SDK APIs between the versions (not negligible)
  • Participated in an internal CTF event again (finished 13th out of 49)
    • At least I succeeded at some reverse engineering challenges

Home improvements

  • Got heat pumps installed in the bedroom and living room
  • Installed outdoor solar lights, replaced an old wired one
  • Got the garden and chicken coop cleaned up (a literal truckload of dry branches and other biowaste)
  • Got a walnut tree trimmed; it was dangerously big
  • A bit overdue, but I upgraded my wired LAN to 1 Gbps

NAS

  • Installed some new HDDs (16 TB + 8 TB)
    • Downloaded 2TB of reddit data (single torrent, data up to 2023-12), it took almost a month to download
      • adding an additional ~45 GB of new data per month (separate torrents)
    • Downloaded backups of english Wikipedia (158 GB total), StackOveflow DB (55 GB), StackExchange (83 GB), HackerNews (9 GB, data up to 2020 only)
    • Downloaded dozens of images of various Linux distros for netbooting
  • Bought my first UPS
    • Set up a local NUT server so I can track UPS status from multiple devices on the network
  • Installed multiple archiving apps such as Tube Archivist and ArchiveBox (running on a Kubernetes cluster together with many other apps and services)

Changes in my daily workflow

  • Started using Timing app (time tracking)
  • Started taking notes on a daily basis
  • Started using Python more

New personal projects

I wanted to build something with Eleventy, so I decided to create a website to track CVEs. It's basically a dashboard with some charts and a counter of days since the last memory management vulnerability was reported, data is fetched from NVD APIs.

Random achievements

  • Notable abbreviations that I stumbled upon (there were so many)
  • Carried a total of almost 2 tonnes of groceries in 2 shopping bags (sometimes 3) in my hands over the year
    • shopped 69 times, averaging in 30 kg of groceries carried per trip (for a distance of ~450 meters)

What's next

  • More learning (it's free!)
  • Start new side projects
  • Set up a Meshtastic node for long range off-grid comms
  • Hoard more data
  • Upgrade my NAS hardware (currently using a 15 years old AMD Athlon II X4 635 CPU)
  • Everything else that I didn't get done last year