The previous years all felt like post Covid years but this time, it felt like we've accepted that this is the new life and that there won't be a way back anymore. (I might be late with this feeling though, how are others feeling?)
For myself, 2019 feels like an eternity away. Because 2020 did not just mean everything around Covid for me but also moving to a new country, starting a new job, living with my now wife and having completely new people and culture around me.
I can barely remember how my life was before this. And sometimes I yearn for that life again. Sometimes, I wish, I could take my wife and go back to that time and show her the different life I had.
But we are here now. And 2024 is almost at its end. And I have to say that it wasn't that bad. As always, this year has been a massive rollercoaster but that also means that there have also been really nice times.
Running a half marathon
In April this year, my wife and I visited Bergen in Norway. Together with my brother and my sister-in-law, we went there to participate in their Bergen marathon. After two failed attempts in the previous years, I've finally completed my first ever half marathon. And I even managed to run it in under two hours which is much faster than I had planned for.
Reading and Writing
As always, I've tried my best to keep my reading and writing habits. It wasn't perfect but I still think I did a decent job here.
I've almost managed my 12 books a year — if we count in all the books I am currently reading, I've reached that target. I've had some really good books this year, but I would say that The Templar Legacy was probably the best one. I'm just a massive fan of historical, mystery books and a good story about templars will always fascinate me.
When it comes to writing, I've set myself a target of writing at least 100 words a day every day. Up until late October, I even kept that streak but then there were a few days that I missed it. But nonetheless, I've written more than 50,000 words this year. That's the length of a short novel.
From these writing sessions, I also published 12 blog posts — including the one you are reading right now. They are of different types, but I realized that I really enjoyed writing there more personal, opinion and thought-focused posts, such as https://rathes.me/blog/en/success which is just kind of a short essay about the idea of success. In the future, I would like to publish more such pieces. This won't get me more visitors on my website or rank well on Google, but I will really enjoy writing these and that's what matters most.
Career and side projects
This year, I also had a change in my career. Even though the current job market is still a real pain, I was able to find a new role after looking for a decent opportunity for almost all of spring and well into summer. But I am grateful to have left a toxic employer and, with HubSpot, to have moved to a new one that is really good to its employees while still being challenging and expecting a decent performance.
The people I've worked with at my previous place were amazing. They were a great bunch of people that I loved working with. I learned a lot from them, and I can't say I hadn't had a great time. But similar to the saying "People don't leave companies, they leave managers", my reason for leaving was escaping leadership on the higher level of the company. The decision they made, the way they communicated, and in my eyes lack of care for the employees were just things I didn't align with. It caused a lot of stress which spilled over into my private life, and I had to protect myself from that.
Kodi — Effortless feature flag management
At the end of last year, I started a small side project that I wanted to tackle for a long time. I wanted to create a feature flag management solution that was as powerful as LaunchDarkly but at the same time, was a lot more delightful to use and priced in a way that small companies and start-ups could experiment with their product without breaking the bank.
I had no specific goal in mind with this, I just enjoyed working with the Laravel, Inertia, Tailwind CSS and React stack. I've still made some decent progress, and if I manage to keep this pace, the project might launch around early spring next year. But again, no pressure from my side.
Other projects
One thing that I noticed for myself is that as soon as I start focusing down on one single project, that project itself feels as much a chore as my day-to-day job, and I end up losing that focus again. For that reason, I decided that I would also be looking at my other projects and not neglect them altogether.
For Maxout, I have a fixed vision of what I want to achieve but I am still unsure how I want to grow this project. I do not want to jump straight into tech and building an app as I did with version one. Instead, I want to start by figuring out if there is a niche that I can get into that also matches my own interest.
My project for learning Tamil, https://learn-tamil.com, is by far my most successful project at the moment. I've grown it to over 25k visitors every month (and double the number in views) just by ranking well on Google. I want to keep working on this in the future and make sure that I manage to keep these visitors longer on the page than just the 1:30 minutes.
While working on Kodi, I also spent a lot of time working on Mozhi. I started Mozhi with the vision to create a content platform that works for any role of a business.
Imagine a place where designer and copy write come up with a decent layout and content for a website and the developer can then consume all of that via API to build out the actual output. Then the marketeer comes together with the copy writer and creates an A/B test with a different writing style, and they run that experiment without even the need for an engineer to make any changes.
That was the initial vision, but I thought, I would start small and build something like a link in bio tool as that could grow into a landing page builder and then grow into the platform that I was envisioning.
However, that didn't work out as expected. I ended up building a full link in bio tool but there was no way out of that anymore. And the world doesn't need yet another link in bio tool. At least not from me. So, I decided to close that project until I come up with a new path for it.
What's up in 2025?
For 2025, I am not going to make any plans or set myself any goals. There is a really big personal change coming up (maybe two even) so I am mainly going to focus on them. I will share these and talk a bit more about them closer to the time.
What I will be focusing on instead is to enjoy every single day more. I want to try to not worry too much about the future and then forget to have fun in my daily life. I think I've had these phases way too often this year and that is something I do want to avoid as much as possible.