End of year review 2024
Well, it's finally time to reflect back on 2024 to see what it was that I actually did. Since I suffer from terrible memory, I scanned through my photo library and calendar dozens of times to gather this list.
The past year highlighted another year of organizing and change.
I managed to hop jobs and develop my existing open source library as well as work on new exciting OS work — maybe more on that later. I also got to focus on a lot of SRE work this year and get acquainted with the SRE community in Finland which I found to be exciting.
Not much on the personal front other than duties, I tried to balance my work-life ratio and enjoy doing things that I wouldn't normally do. Of course, being the main organizer for an annual board game tournament took its usual toll on me. This year, I decided that I would probably not be doing it for a while. I feel that this was the right choice.
Next, a list of highlights from my year and some pictures to accompany.
Højerup Gamle Kirke, Denmark
- Personal highlights
- After 5 years with my first-ever pair of glasses, I decided to get me new ones with varifocal lenses. It was the best health decision I made this year, allowing me to focus on my life with much more ease.
- Traveling highlights
- Visited Legoland after almost 30 years!
- Visited an Anish Kapoor exhibition (we visited this by accident in Denmark)
- Witnessed my first Danish midsummer
- Visited the Atlantic wall
- Disc golf
- Started seeing more birdie results
- Did an excursion to courses in Tampere (Hervanta & Vihioja) with a friend of mine, which I really enjoyed
- Personal realization that I currently love creating more than I love consuming (say books or games)
This was from a work-related party where I made Nankai ramen cocktail using 3oz soju, 1.5oz dashi, 0.25oz syrup, 1 dash of shiro dashi, 1~3 dashes yuzu, and 1 dash chili oil
- On work & programming
- Worked as an epic lead for a strategic, time-critical epic. We were trying to get an already built backend proof-of-concept ready for internal user testing by building the missing backend & frontend pieces. At the end of the quarter, we could demonstrate the initial end-to-end capabilities of the feature within the platform.
- Exited from Metosin!
- Released 1.1.0 to my GraphQL query library oksa which introduced an API to construct the queries using functions instead of just data (thanks Tommi for the suggestion!)
- Published a microlibrary for parsing & generating W3C trace contexts
- Joined SOK!
- At SOK, implemented SLOs for all of our critical services within the team and lead a multi-team effort to adopt Dynatrace successfully
- Visited multiple SRE meetups and realized it's a thing I love
- Had my first ever 1:1 business lunch with another developer who I didn't know beforehand (thanks for hooking us up Joel!)
- Learned how to integrate Go libraries with Clojure/Babashka using Babashka pods
Me with my new glasses, very 90's look reminiscent of my father (minus the hair maybe)
- On food
- Organized an annual Japanese dinner for my friends, this time with the following menu:
- Yokan (made by my friend)
- HERUSHINKI cocktail (a famous drink by restaurant Gaijin made by my friend)
- Miso marinated egg yolks with cucumber served with Nankai ramen cocktail
- Japanese potato salad (made by my friend)
- Oikimuchi (made by my friend)
- Deep-fried eggplant in dashi sauce
- Deep-fried tofu in dashi sauce
- Chikuwa fish cake fritters with aonori seaweed (this one had the most potential but ultimately fell flat, maybe because there wasn't enough aonori 🤷)
- Spicy fried octopus nuggets (absolutely my favorite)
- Fresh squid salad
- Yurinchi
- Teppanyaki
- Grilled wagyu steak Japanese style (surprisingly not in my TOP1, maybe like TOP3)
- Tobanjan (we didn't make this, but I made it the following morning using Kanzuri as the spice condiment)
- Tried making chilled lime soba soup for the first time during a very warm Summer day, a definite recommendation!
- Experimented with okra for the first time
- Learned new places where green shiso can be bought (last I checked, Kamppi supermarket & Bangkok Shop in Kamppi) and bought my fair share of it, of course
- Bought a Japanese deep-fry pot which comes with a thermometer and a lid which can be converted to a drying rack (quite a gamechanger for my deep-frying game)
- Organized an annual Japanese dinner for my friends, this time with the following menu:
Grilled A5 wagyu steak Japanese style, photo by Vennu Nivalainen
- On boardgames
- Was the main organizer & main referee in a 17-person boardgaming tournament event where we played out EastFront using our own custom multiplayer rules to scale a 2-player boardgame to as much as 12 players (not including referees and other spectator roles). This was our 15th year of playing this game in tournament form.
A glimpse of how our ranking system looked like during this year of EastFront, implemented last year to address the problem of melting fronts & easy mistakes
- On blogging
- Tried writing week notes, but I could only sustain this for 5 weeks before I ran out of stamina
A nazi bunker remade as a piece of art, from Blåvand strand, Denmark
In 2025, I hope I will:
- Commit to do less organizing
- Play war boardgames more
- Goto Japan
- Do more programming, particularly infrastructure work