A personal look back on 2024

"What a year, huh?"

"Captain, it's— oh, wait, it is actually the end of the year... the fourth of January..."

(I didn't finish this post in time and missed my chance to make this joke. Consider all mentions of "this year" references to 2024.)

2024 kind of flew by for me. It feels like nothing really happened, but, then again, a lot of things did happen. Here are a couple things that sort of, kind of happened. They're not necessarily all discrete events, but rather a collection of stuff that "shaped" my 2024. Please note: this review is entirely personal!

A year of technology

Even though I'm very much a "guy in tech", I wasn't particularly occupied with technology in 2024. Various things that happened were connected to it, sure, not to mention my studies and my job, but I suppose it didn't take up as much of my personal time as in some of the previous years. I think the amount of actual programming I did was at an all-time low (since I've started) too. I didn't even do Advent of Code this year, something I'm usually very hyped for. Here's a quick recap of what I did in programming:

• a handful of small/minor contributions to different projects, among them miniflux, minasshd, frenring (fork), and clj-nix
• a started attempt at a djot implementation in Java. There's so little there I can hardly even count it.
• sfv-clj, a Clojure library for (de)serialisation of HTTP structured field values. Basis for the next library, ...
• http-message-signatures-clj, a Clojure library implementing... HTTP Message signatures. It's not completely done but usable. I made it while I was experimenting with a design for a HTTP-based protocol.
• Pages Tutorial, a short guide on how to set up a static site on Codeberg pages (with some useful scripts for deployment)
• Buckshot Roulette Analyzer, an attempt at computing the optimal strategy for the turn-based indie game Buckshot Roulette. I have a three-part series of blog posts planned about solving this game.
• Dependent Types PoC, proof of concept for implementing depedent types in Java using the Checker Framework. This is ultimately for my Bachelor's thesis and will get more complex, but I decided to publish the "novelty" of what I'm doing independently as well.
• this blog! I've been on and off this year adding stuff, rewriting said stuff again, and just playing around with it.

As you can see in the links above, I started putting all of my new projects on Codeberg instead of GitHub, and I've declared a sort of "soft departure" from the latter:

I believe that at some point, the open source community's commitment to GitHub is going to blow up in our faces. It's practically inevitable. GitHub is itself not open source and a for-profit company steered by Microsoft. Give Microsoft a monopoly over something, and eventually they're going to start turning the knobs to see how much value they can squeeze from their users. Relying on GitHub alone is a bad move strategically, if nothing else.

Are you prepared for GitHub turning to shit? Are we? Think about the grip this single corporation has on the entire open source world. Software forges, like anything else, can enshittify. It's happened before, and it's bound to happen again. Right now, GitHub is still tolerable (though they have added a fair bunch of shit no one asked for in the past few years). How long is it going to stay that way? I don't know, but whatever the future holds, I don't want free software to suffer for it.

I also joined the Codeberg non-profit association in 2024, met some Codeberg contributors for the first time, and commissioned a glorious logo redesign from aikoyori, which I plan to add to the official Codeberg home page (soon™).

On another note, 2024 was the year where my most successful programming project died. My first public Discord bot was an implementation of poker and was enjoyed by around 13000 Discord servers went it went offline. The reason behind its demise was pretty straight-forward: Discord asked me to (re-)verify my identity with them (a kind of Know-Your-Customer policy for developers of big bots), and I'd lost motivation to go through the effort after not having worked on it for a long time. So I don't feel particularly sad about it, but it was cool to see in the end that there were actually quite a lot of people who enjoyed something that I created.¹

Lastly, a significant technological change in 2024 for me personally was my move away from Google Mail. I now have most of my personal email addresses (plus addresses for my family) at provider migadu, whom I don't have a single complaint with. Their decision to base their plans on volume of email traffic instead of number of accounts is so refreshingly pragmatic in today's insane world of software as a service.

A year of culture

Reading

After a hiatus of around 8 years or so, I made a ground-breaking discovery at the end of last year: I actually like reading books! And I realised that — compared to endless YouTube consumption or social media feed doomscrolling — books are a pretty valuable and fulfilling form of entertainment. So around one year ago, I set myself a goal to read 12 books in 2024. I signed up to my local libraries and ended up reading a variety of stuff, 15 books in total, most notably:

• I finished the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Liu Cixin
• I read my first two novels by Saša Stanišić (HERKUNFT and Möchte die Witwe angesprochen werden, platziert sie auf dem Grab die Gießkanne mit dem Ausguss nach vorne) and instantly fell in love
• I was charmed by Going Postal, my first time reading Terry Pratchett
• I watched both Dune movies and read the first novel (with mixed feelings)
• I started and finished the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, which immediately entered the figurative top row of my "best books of all time" tier list
• I participated in a seminar on ethics and software, and read a lot of stuff on Big Data and AI, including Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction and Dan McQuillans Resisting AI

In terms of getting back into reading, I would say this year was an all-around success. There were times when I still needed to push myself to pick up a book instead of the phone next to it – but I've come a long way. Like many other hobbies, reading turned out to be a very social activity as well: I kept exchanging books with people and finding new interpersonal connections that weren't there before. I also started tracking my reads as well as my want-to-reads on Bookwyrm, a social reading platform.

Books weren't the only thing I read 2024; I started following a lot of blogs and newsletters. Most of them are listed in my blogroll, but I'd like to point out the following ones in particular for having made the biggest impression on me:

• Marie Le Conte's Young Vulgarian
• Molly White's Citation Needed
• Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day
• Nikhil Suresh's Ludicity
• Dom Tyer's Fire Red Sky, in particular the monthly Fighting with the Undertow playlist
• Lu Wilson's Wikiblogarden
• maia crimew's blog
• Übermedien

Currently I'm a bit (very) behind on my feed reader, especially after it broke and I didn't read any blogs for 2 weeks. Next year, I want to build a blog reading routine that doesn't overwhelm me as much.

Film and TV

I have a very good friend who can be reasonably described as a movie buff. Talking to him made me realise how little I know about movies, and also how few movies I know. There was a bit of trend this year for me to watch movies that I felt I'd missed somehow, but also new ones (not all of which I remember as I'm typing this, to be honest). I went to KIT's unikino a couple times this year, where a group of students offer weekly movie nights in a lecture hall on campus. I wish I'd gone more often – they had a really interesting programme this year.

There was a bit of a continued trend of watching horror, with a random assortment varying in quality: Midsommar, Get Out, Friday the 13th, John Carpenter's The Thing, and the first three Alien movies, among others. Alien in particular became one of my all-time favourite series this year, and I can't wait to watch the rest. I plan on watching more horror movies next year, primarily because I used to avoid the genre completely until a few years ago.

"TV" is definitely a misnomer for most of the shows I watched this year, as most of them were streaming-exclusive. Like many people, I have the feeling that I don't really engage with TV shows anymore as much as I passively consume them. Unfortunately, a lot of the slop served up by Netflix et al. isn't really worth engaging with – still, this is something that I want to change next year. Consciously deciding to watch something, and doing so in moderation, with a clear mind. One notable exception to this mindless consumption was my first, careful venture into the world of anime. I intentionally looked for some light and charming entertainment, and found it in Spy x Family at the beginning and Cowboy Bebop at the very end of this year. I know there is probably a lot of anime that I would enjoy, but I think I have to sift through the sheer volume of it all first to find the things that truly suit my tastes.

Music

I'm realising I should find some way to track the concerts I go to. Anyway, here are the ones I went to this year (I hope I didn't forget any):

• listentojules: small singer/songwriter from Germany. The music surprised me in many positive ways. I'll have to make a note to go to another one of her concerts next time I have the chance.
• Benny Greb Brass Band: my drummer friend dragged me along to this one, because Benny Greb is apparently a big name. I had a lot of fun, even though I'm not a huge fan of brass-only.
• Soulcafé: great covers of all things soul and funk-adjacent. Just a fun time all around. This was my second time seeing them.
• DARTZ and Private Function: I've written about this concert in my AMA already – it was probably the one that left the biggest mark on me. The Kiwis and Aussies make some really great punk rock!
• Team Scheisse (twice!): I'm a big fan of this band, but 2 concerts in the same year was maybe a bit much. Their shows are intense and filled with silliness though, I recommend.
• Zotos Kompania: really good Greek Rembetika music, performed annually in Berlin's b-flat Jazz club.

Everyone knows by now that Spotify is a shit platform that fucks over artists, and I'm not happy about how much I've used it over the past year. One of my goals for 2025 is definitely to start buying music, especially from smaller artists that I listen to a lot.

However, I won't deny that Spotify occasionally lures me into music I probably wouldn't have discovered as easily otherwise. This year, this was especially true for a kind of hip hop that I've grown rather fond of. One of my top artists this year was Noname, an American rapper whose style and voice I fell in love with. I found similar enjoyment in the music of British rapper ENNY. In a similar vein, I started listening to a lot of acid jazz, a vaguely defined fusion genre of hip hop and jazz, although I didn't really get into any particular artist.

There was one other artist that I listened to more than any other, and that was Martina DaSilva. I'm an absolute sucker for Bossa Nova, and this woman absolutely delivered with her most recent album, "Bim Bom". Her other album this year, "Living Room Petit", has some amazing early-20th-century style vocalist jazz on it, which you should give a listen too!

There is a lot more music that I could talk about, and a lot of artists I discovered this year, but I want to finish this mess of a section by highlighting the new punk/alt bands I found this year (some of them by chance, others through Dom Tyer's newsletter):

• VIAL has been playing on repeat recently. They put out two albums this year: "burnout" and "Grow The Fuck Up", both of which are great records, mostly on the rather sentimental side, but sometimes really hitting you with in-your-face anger. Pretty similar in sound to the earlier stuff from Destroy Boys, whom I also highly recommend.
• I found out about DARTZ through the concert I've mentioned earlier. This year's album "Dangerous Day To Be A Cold One" has banger after banger on it, and is just a complete blast in every sense of the word.
• ALVILDA is a French group who recently put out their debut album "C'est déjà l'heure". Familiar sound and great vocals. I'm excited to see where they'll go next.
• Slutever is a duo that found its way into my heart with a kind of pop punk that has super catchy melodies but also some rough edges left. Unfortunately, they only released one album so far ("Almost Famous"), and that was 8 years ago. In the event they'll make a comeback, 2025 is going to be a great year.
• Some more bands where I really like a couple songs but haven't made my way through the rest of their discography yet:
  • Fresh
  • Human People (no new music this year unfortunately)
  • Weakened Friends
  • Being Dead
  • Dream Nails

One trend I'm noticing in my discoveries this year is that most of them are not dudes, which is nice for a change. Looking at my punk rock listening history, it used to be much more male-dominated.

Video games

I barely played any video games this year, something that I want to change in 2025. I did play about a handful:

• A bit of Stardew Valley
• Buckshot Roulette (although I spent more time on analysis than actually playing)
• Prey (which I thought was really good and scratched a similar itch as Alien and the Southern Reach did for me)
• Dave the Diver (not very far yet, but super charming and fun)

A year of social events

Ok, maybe the title of this section is a bit exaggerated for the sake of fitting the pattern. When I read about what some other people were up to all year, I might as well count as somewhat of a basement dweller, which... fair enough.

That said, two big events did happen this year, at both of which I experienced completely unfamiliar environments and made new friends. One was in the first half of the year: Gulaschprogrammiernacht aka GPN, a 4-day hacking event organised by my local division of the Chaos Computer Club. It was my first time attending a CCC event, and it was so incredibly vibrant and over-stimulating that I needed a break for a while afterwards. I'm very likely going to attend the next instalment in June as well, so if you're in for a few days and nights of silly engineering projects, talks and workshops about literally anything, food, drink, and raves, definitely come by Karlsruhe around that time.

The second big event was Heart of Clojure in September. I've already written about it at length, so I'm not going to say much else here, except stressing again that going there was one of the best decisions of the year.

A year of future prospects

While nothing much changed during 2024 in my life, a lot of prospective changes crystallised for the next year. A lot is going to change: I'm going to graduate from university, which also means my employment status will change. On top of that, I'm likely going to move to a new apartment. All of that is going to happen around March, so I already know I'll be in for a ride.

I also started thinking properly about where I want to go next and what I want to do. Now I know that I want to take a break from studying for 1-2 years and work full-time in that period in order to earn money and gain some more professional experience. I'll stick with my current employer after graduation for a while longer, but I'll also keep my eyes open for other opportunities that would offer me a change of scenery. At the end of the year, I plan to apply to an internship with the European Commission that would be more about public policy and administration than technical work, but I think making some different experiences could be very valuable.

And then? Well, 2024 was the year where I've decided that I want to continue with a Master's degree, and that I don't want to stay at KIT for it. It's not that I think it's a bad university for doing your Master's (it's pretty great for that), just that I want to see something else again. Having studied for almost four and a half years there, I know the professors, I know the core subjects, I know what this uni is good at and also what it's bad at. Also, I do enjoy living in Karlsruhe for the most part, but I could do with a change in city too.

So one of my goals for 2025 (see below) is to visit many new places, and evaluate whether they'd suit me as somewhere to go for my future studies. I've started doing this a little bit in 2024 already with my trips to Belgium and the Netherlands (previously), but I want to do a lot more of that in the following year. I'd like to venture further up North to Scandinavia, but also to the East of Germany, where I've probably spent the least amount of time in Europe so far. And, at the risk of sounding like an absolute cliché Mastodon user, I hope I can make most (or all) of these trips by train!

Resolutions for 2025

I've never been much of a new year's resolutions guy, for reasons similar to those of other skeptics. People tend to be overly ambitious, quickly realise they won't fulfill their expectations, and then feel miserable about it. The classic "cancelling the gym membership in February"-type situation.

On the 30th I saw a post by Jess Rose praising a different approach to New Year's resolutions: bingo cards! You set yourself a bunch of goals, arrange them in a bingo card, and instead of being all-or-nothing for every single one, you play bingo. So I figured, why not try doing that? Here's my personal resolutions bingo card for 2025²:

Some of these goals are almost guaranteed to be reached, some are less likely, and others just require me to get my ass up. I will count every bingo I get as a success :)

I wish you all a happy new year! May it be a year of health and prosperity for you.