2024 a Year in Review

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The older you get, the faster time goes. Nana used to say that whenever I complained about the pace of events. At a young age, my mind could not imagine what that speed of time would feel like. But now, I know the feeling all too well. If once-a-year review posts interest you, check out my 2023 post here. Let’s take a peak at how things went over the last year.

1. Writing

2022 Blog Posts: 4
2023 Blog Posts: 8
2024 Blog Posts: 7

2023 Posts at Work: 44 posts (26,199 words)
2024 Posts at Work: 56 posts (32,747 words)

My main writing goal in 2024 focused on progress over perfection, and it paid off. The numbers don’t lie: I published more words than in any other year Looking back over my previous years, I believe I’ve reached the sustainable upper limit of hours spent writing. It feels like a good time to change direction.

This year will focus on writing effectively while maintaining my output. To support my goal, I’ve pursued exploring other resources to sharpen my craft. First stop, The LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively video on Youtube. Larry McEnerney offers a wealth of actionable insights to elevate your writing. If you’re a writer who uses words to persuade or influence, this video belongs on your watch list. I’d recommend setting aside an hour to watch it and take notes — you’ll come away a better writer.

2025 Writing Goal: Research and practice writing more effectively.

2. Reading

My Goodreads challenge of reading 14 books ended up reaching 19. We’ve got some intriguing themes in last year’s reading list:

Cultural critique and societal reflection
Self-improvement and personal growth
Philosophy and the meaning of life
Storytelling and creative exploration

While every book left its mark, some drove deeper than others:

The first was Outlive. The book served as a blueprint for helping me build the foundation for my fitness journey. I’d always seen exercise as a means to live longer but had little understanding of what that looked like in practice. Peter Attia offers a whirlwind tour of longevity science with actionable advice and clear goals. I found it surprising how much of his recommended testing overlaps with the standard ones available in Canada.

House of Leaves was a wild, mind-bending trip that defied expectations. The ergodic writing style feels unsettling, disorienting, and utterly captivating. A book that reads like an experience more than just a story, I couldn’t put it down.

The Brothers Karamazov was a marathon, not a sprint. For long stretches, it sat on my nightstand, I wasn’t sure I’d ever finish it. As the saying goes, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. That’s what reading this book felt like. It’s an exercise in patience that is highly rewarding once you make it to the end.

In 2025, my goal focuses not on upping numbers but sustaining them. The pace is enjoyable without being overwhelming. I also hope to catch up on a selection of technical papers.

2025 Reading Goal: 19 books. My focus is more on maintaining rather than increasing.

3. Mindfulness & Leadership

These two concepts seem to go hand in hand. I tried to keep a narrow scope and explore fewer topics more deeply.

During Automattic’s leadership course, the topic of Emotional Intelligence caught my attention, so I picked up Emotional Intelligence Habits. The book contains two larger sections: Emotional Intelligence at Large and Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace. Each section is further broken down into chapters that you can read independently. I read the book over several weeks, giving time to reflect and absorb each chapter. One of the chapters is ironically titled “Practice Mindfulness”.

I also read Stolen Focus, which was also insightful. The book highlights how technology, multitasking, work culture, and stress overload our brains, making any meaningful thinking harder to achieve. Much of our modern technology hijacks your amygdala and floods your brain with distractions. It reinforced how the importance of reclaiming your focus in a world that thrives on keeping us distracted. But how does one avoid distractions is such a busy world?

Why, meditation, of course. Towards the end of the year, I had a chance encounter with an old friend. As we caught up, one thing he mentioned stuck with me: how much his meditation practice had affected clarity in his thinking. Meditation has always been a, yeah I’ll get there sometime, kind of thing. Our conversation helped persuade me to give it a try.

I decided to go with the Waking Up app by Sam Harris. While I’ve never been a fan of Sam’s arguments on religion (I find them reductive) he knows a thing or two about meditation. After using the app, I’m now a firm believer that mindfulness is essential for improving focus Without it, you are at the mercy of the emotional triggers generated by notifications and click-bait articles. The feeling of FOMO or avoidance of boredom that causes you to doom scroll social media. Remember: if it’s free, you are the product.

I also got to take part in Automattic’s BetterOn training offering, which provides great tips on improving your on-camera presence. Each week, you record yourself practicing new techniques for your coach to review. My biggest takeaway was realizing how much the camera mutes your actions and voice. To come across naturally on video, you need to be far more animated than you would in a regular conversation. For remote workers, on-camera presence is a big part of how you’re perceived, might as well have it come across well.

2025 Goals: Develop a meditation habit, enroll in Automattic’s coaching program, and figure out what’s next for leadership

4. Fitness

When COVID came along, I bought a Peloton bike and shifted doing spin at home. I’d log in, choose a random 30-minute class (typically Kendall Toole, who’s no longer at Peloton), and pedal. This was keeping me active, but I was starting to plateau. This is where Outlive came in, to guide my next steps. The two biggest takeaways from the book were:

Viewing your fitness journey as a longer-term process over years.
Building cardio, strength, and mobility together.

My current regime was missing two-thirds of a well-rounded workout. When I tried to do the Apley Scratch Test, my left shoulder was acceptable, but my right shoulder was severely lacking. Your fingers should be within a couple of inches, and I could not get my right arm above parallel with the ground. Given the situation, I knew taking things slow would be my best course of action. Probably slower than was necessary, but again, I’m not in a race here, it’s progress over perfection.

4.1 Improving Cardio

Outlive introduced me to the deeper performance metrics of functional threshold power (FTP), watts/kg, and V02 max. Peloton offers an FTP test where you go all out for 20 minutes and it’ll receive your score, my first test was about 226 watts. You can divide your FTP by your weight in Kg and that gives you watts/kg, mine was 2.60. Watts/Kg is a better relative metric than FTP, someone who’s 6'4" will have a much different FTP than someone 5'10".

Once you have your FTP, you can use that to calculate your optimal watt output during a workout. Peloton offers Power Zone workouts which calculate everything for you, all you have to do is ride. They also offer programs designed to help you see even better progress. I ended up enrolling in the Peak Your Power Zones 8-week program, 3 days a week. The class was great to help build up my cardio but 3 days made it difficult for me to also incorporate mobility and strength. I plan to take it again but over 12 weeks instead of 8. My final test hit a FTP of 248 with 2.87 watts/kg.

While FTP and watts/kg focus on power output during cycling, VO2 max provides a broader view of your cardiovascular fitness. It’s a little trickier to measure accurately, but it’s just as important in tracking progress. I’ve got my Apple watch to help me measure, but who knows how accurate that is? One can hope that it’s at least good for relative measurements. It’s also tricky since I do my V02 max measuring by walking outdoors, and I’m pretty confident that weather affects the reading. My max rating throughout the year was 43.6.

I was happy to see my progress trend in the right direction. But again, to get that insight, it required taking a step back to see the long view. These numbers fluctuate on the regular and dips are a regular part of the cycle. What matters is staying consistent and trusting the process.

2025 Goal: Hit 3 watts/kg or above, hit 46 V02 max on Apple watch.

4.2 Improving Mobility

Peloton offers full-body mobility classes, but my main focus was getting my shoulders. I researched various stretches and worked on getting both arms in a better place. Instagram turned out to be one of the best places to find mobility exercises. You can get everything you need by searching “shoulder mobility” and finding someone with an accredited background. I found banded shoulder dislocates and pull aparts to be the most effective. Now both shoulders can touch fingers together, with some slight help from the wall.

2025 Goal: Both shoulders able to grab 4 fingers without the use of a wall

4.3 Improving Strength

My mindset going into strength training was to log everything and take it slow. I’m at the age where I don’t have any ego in working out, it’s about making sure I can walk the next day. As Dr.Attia said, you have to look at the longer horizon of years. Not weeks, not even months, but years.

I started off with a light calisthenics routine I did 2-3 times a month. It consisted of:

5 Chin Ups
30 sec Wall Sit
10 Chair Dips
8 Squats
8 Push ups
3-4 Pull Ups

The first workout made it to about 50% completion on each item, sad face. At first, I doubted whether such a low frequency schedule could make a difference. Was two or three times a month even worth the effort? Turns out, yes, it does make a difference and was well worth the effort. Frequency is less important than staying consistent when starting out.

While logging helps with monitoring progress, it also helps you know when to push. If you know you did 8 pushups last workout, try doing 9 this time. Your results will give you the insights to go harder or take time to recover. This year, with a solid foundation, I feel much more comfortable making that push.

2025 Goals: 50 pushups, 20 pull-ups, 1 muscle up

5. Technical Goals

I didn’t make any explicit technical goals for last year, I wasn’t sure where to invest time. Instead, I decided to let the wind blow me in any direction.

I landed in the land of Lua. Lua is a popular language for embedding in applications with a syntax that resembles python’s. It’s also the programming language used for Neovim, my editor of choice. It’s been top of mind to try learning a new language for a while, and Lua seemed to like a good fit. The lesson I’ve learned with new languages is that they need to be applicable. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

As I grew more comfortable with Lua, I decided to create my first project: qfnotes, short for (q)uick (f)ix (n)otes. Its functionality is similar to vim’s built-in marks, with the ability to leave a one-sentence note. When I’m exploring or refactoring code, it’s handy to leave notes all over the codebase to revisit later. A couple of other plugins had similar features, but the feature set seemed small enough to build out on my own. The code lives in my NixOS monorepo where I vendor it into my Neovim setup with NixOS. I plan on pulling it out into it’s own git repository.

The other project I took on was reading Designing Data Intensive Applications. It’s a challenging read, and I wanted to make sure I was absorbing the material, so I started working through Fly.io’s Gossip Gloomers The Gossip Gloomers are a set of increasingly difficult distributed software problems. The goal for this is simple: Finish each challenge, then write a blog post about it.

This year I have a better idea of what I’d like my technical goals to be. They’re a good mix of being pragmatic, challenging, and not too consuming.

2025 Goals: Move qfnotes to separate repository, finish and blog about Gossip Gloomers

6. Learning French

Speaking of second languages, I decided to start learning French. My oldest son started kindergarten in French immersion, why not learn in tandem? It’ll make the language applicable. To learn the basics, I’ve been using DuoLingo, which has been great. My goal for this is to be able to pick up a random French children’s book and read it in full.

2025 Goal: Be able to read at kindergarten level