Reflections on My 2024
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It’s been 13 months since I wrote my first blogpost in 2023, and now we’re already in 2025. If you do the math, that’s a 2-year gap between the blog debut and this year. What happened to my 2024?
Growing This Website
When I first started this website in the end of 2023, it didn’t have a design system yet. Back then, I only standardized the color scheme and the font family to be used. The rest of it was just how should the website generally look like.
As I began pouring more content in this website, I realized that not having a design system slows down my pace as I began to notice the discrepancies between pages. One day, it might be the color that’s a bit off; the next day it might be the spacings; and so on.
Realizing this, I spent a lot of time building a more concrete design system for this website along with public branding elements such as dynamic OG images. I’m quite happy with the result as I no longer overthink the styling and can focus on the content of the site.
Speaking of content, I wrote 3 blogpost in 2024. All were engineering-related, but with varying topics. It’s not much, but I think it’s a good start.
Open Source Activities
My biggest open source contribution in 2024 was to e18e, an initiative aimed at addressing performance issues in the JavaScript ecosystem, which I stumbled upon from social media.
We're excited to share e18e! Ecosystem Performance is a community initiative to bring together people who are passionate about improving performance in the JavaScript ecosystem. A space for knowledge sharing, contributions, and ideas. Get involved! 🙌 e18e.dev/blog/e18e
While I didn’t handle the heavy lifting, such as maintaining the initiative or developing leveled-up libraries, I contributed by migrating an obsolete dependency on various high-profile repositories. In the process, I learned a lot from the inner workings of the projects I contributed to.
I honestly didn’t expect much from e18e at the beginning, but I’m happy that this community has exceeded my expectations. Not only as a place to coordinate the initiative, I’ve ‘stolen’ a lot of libraries and technique that I didn’t know existed just from hanging out in the Discord server.
In short, I see e18e as a place where developers who genuinely cares about the state of JavaScript gathers and contribute to make the ecosystem better. Don’t be shy to join us as we don’t bite newcomers (at least I think patak and 43081j don’t)
Besides contributing to community initiatives, I’ve also worked on some shiny new side-projects:
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j2v is a small CLI tool that helps migrate your Jest test suite to Vitest automatically via codemods.
I initally created this for my company, but I decided to share it publicly.
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astro-subfont is a plugin for Astro that optimizes your typefaces by subsetting them based on the build output using subfont.
This integration is used on this website!
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instablitz is a Visual Studio Code plugin that exports your workspace to Stackblitz directly from your IDE.
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tailwind-pointer-queries is a work-in-progress TailwincCSS plugin that adds the missing CSS pointer query as a variant.
Since I’ve discovered other niche media queries that aren’t currently available as a Tailwind variant, I plan to expand the scope of this project to include those missing queries.
New Hardware
In February 2024, I short-circuited my G14 laptop by accident while I was trying to replace the thermal paste due to high temps. I was devastated, as it was my only device and the repair cost was almost exactly the same as buying a new one.
Since spending a lot of money to ‘re-buy’ my laptop didn’t seem wise, I had to settle with using only my work device to code for a while. This incident led me to vow never to rely on a laptop as my primary development device again.
On September 2024, I finally decided to treat myself by building a PC that serves as my primary device for coding.
Aside from building my own PC, I also decided to upgrade my workspace peripherals, including a 27-inch IPS monitor and a programmable, hot-swappable mechanical keyboard.
While I was quite skeptical at first, the ergonomics provided by these new peripherals bring are simply unbeatable compared to peripherals that I used previously, which in turn made me more comfortable during long coding sessions.
Advent of TypeScript
Finally, I closed out the year by participating in Advent of TypeScript, which is essentially an Advent of Code designed to be tackled via TypeScript type system. This wasn’t my first time participating, as I also joined the first Advent of TypeScript.
The 2024 event focused more on the practicality of the type system that can be used in real-life projects as opposed to esotericism of the 2023 event.
The days that really made an impression on me were the 23rd and 24th day challenge, where we are challenged with writing a higher-order function using the type system only. I personally didn’t know that it was possible to do this with just the type system!
In the end, I placed quite high in the final leaderboard, but what matters the most to me is the knowledge that I gained from doing this event. So, I’d like to say thanks to trash and the TypeHero team for organizing this event!
Regrets of 2024
While I think 2024 was a pretty good year for both my career and personal life, I do have some regrets that I want to avoid in 2025
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Not Building Enough Personal Branding
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In my first blogpost, I mentioned that I want to use this website as my learning-in-public platform, I realized that I didn’t do much in terms of being public, as evidenced by the site metrics provided by Umami
namchee.dev metrics in 2024. Notice that it only spiked on the end of 2024 While I do learn a lot of things over the course of 2024, I only shared those insights in a closed Discord environment and didn’t fully utilize my social media accounts (Bluesky, after migrating from X) to the fullest.
The number of blog posts that I wrote in 2024 also didn’t contribute much to my personal branding, as I rarely published anything, despite having a lot of topics to write about in my backlog.
Looking back, the main reason why I didn’t publish much was because I became too focused on the quality and uniqueness of my content, to the point where I ended up not publishing anything at all.
Instead, I should have focused on writing and publishing posts first, leaving improvements for later. After all, I’m in full control of this website, so I shouldn’t feel blocked when improving existing contents.
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Not Enough Self Investment
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In 2024, I’ve finished reading 5 books with 1 still in progress. While it’s comparable to 2023, I feel that I haven’t done enough as I neglected investing in my hard skills in practice.
At the beginning of the year, I planned to expand my language repertoire by learning Zig or Rust and improve my front-end game by learning Three.js. Unfortunately, I spectacularly failed at all of them with various made-up excuses.
In 2025, I plan to take a more extreme measure by taking a paid course to ensure my accountability.
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Not Maintaining Existing Projects
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If you take a look at the commit history of my showcased project, like OJK Invest API, you’ll notice that I haven’t made any updates to it, despite a lingering bug on the data extractor.
What’s worse, the scrapers didn’t actually work until I realize it in May 2024!
Commit History of OJK Invest API. It feels bad to neglect bugs for an entire year While sometimes it’s OK to put projects on freeze and move on, I feel that I can still do more with my old projects and I believe that a good engineer is not only someone who writes good software, but also someone who maintains it well.
In 2025, I plan to slow down on starting new projects and invest more time on addressing debts in my old projects.
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Not Enough Exercise
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Lastly, I didn’t exercise enough in 2024 and it’s starting to take its toll by the end of 2024, as I feel more sluggish compared to the beginning of the year.
In 2025, I planned to make myself more accountable of my own health by tracking my exercise history on my phone through Google Fit
Final Thoughts
And that’s a wrap for 2024! While the year had some disappointing downs, 2024 was a meaningful year for me both personal and professional wise. I hope that I can learn from my regrets and improve on 2025.
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