Table of Contents
Following the tradition, writing my annual review. This year, being from ups and downs, a lot of things happened. I can consider 2024 a good year looking from the macro perspective, but far from what I would like. I was able to conclude my biggest objective for this year, but looking from the personal side, I wasn’t good as I expected.
Reflecting on what happened in this year, gave us some insights about what are the things that is going well and which things we will need to fix on the next year. And, in my case, I have a lot of things to fix.
Similar to last year, the structure of the post will be following like this: we will have some core points like “health”, “reading”, “habits”, “coding”, “career”, etc. And, for this year, I’ll be doing a kind of comparison to see how much we improved on those ones or if we was able to maintain it.
Health
In the opposition from what I said in the expectations for 2024, I didn’t take too much care from my health this year. I was a lot below the average on the three critical points on health that I believe that would help me: sleep, gym and nutrition.
Specifically about those three points, I didn’t dedicate myself enough to fit what I expected from those ones, and all those threes are interconnected, which had side-effects in other aspects of my life, like, for example, feeling tired during the days. In this year, I could see how much having an unhealth life impacts in our life and, in my case, mostly having psychological effects about it.
From my experience, it was pretty hard to have a good night of sleep, staying focused for long times or even not being too stressful during the day. Also, it seems that it impacts a lot on “ADHD crisis”, where, in some days, it was just impossible to work without my medicines.
Also, from sleep routine, I think that this year was a bit difficult to stay focused on that too. Even because my new apartment is on the downtown, there’s more noise and chaos, then being more disciplined on that was very hard. My sleep time average was about 6 hours, but knowing myself, I know that this isn’t enough to be 100% functional on the next day. Also, I completely lost my habit of waking up between 6AM and 7AM.
I’m not fully commited on gym too, it’s a pretty hard habit to maintain, I need to commit hard on that and being focused on the long term objectives. But, not just from bad things, my year in health is going on, this year I discovered a new sport that I really loved: climbing. I really love it. It’s one of the things that I really want to maintain in the next year.
Reading
This year, I started the year maintaining the goal of 12 books until the end of the year, but I reached out only about 6 or 7 of them, to be honest, some of them are so useless in their concepts that is completely insignificant for myself. During the year, I noted this bad behavior, I wasn’t reading because I’d like to read more about the theme, I just read because of the quantity. After that, I decided to slow down my reading and coming back with better books that I’d like to read. Some of the books that I can mentioned that I read was:
- Database Internals, by Alex Petrov
- Antifragile, by Nassim N. Taleb
- Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim N. Taleb
Also, I started a lot of books that I dropped after some time, because I was feeling that the reading wasn’t productive as I expected, like: “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement” and “Thinking Fast and Slow”, both from Daniel Kahneman, are two of those books that I dropped after some time.
In the moment I’m writing this, I’m reading what I believed that will be my first readings from 2025: “Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”, by Douglas R. Hofstadter, and “The Mind Illuminated”, by John Yates, the last one as a recommendation from a friend, because I’m really interested in investigate some long term effects from meditation in my life. Further that, for the next year, I have a lot of good books to read, most of them focused on technical aspects, but I want to reread some of the old books that I read too.
Career and Work
I think that, from the career perspective, this year was awesome. I was able to complete the most import objective from my year in this aspect. Now, I have the great opportunity of working with awesome guys at Fireflies.ai, and it’s being awesome in every sense. I’m working with a lot of good engineers and having the opportunity to bring innovation for millions of users, further the aspect of learning a lot of new skills and technologies around it.
From my career perspective, I could be better on that, I believe I could dedicate myself more during the year and investing more time on side projects and learning in general. I have some advances on the distributed systems topics, but below my expectations. For the next year, one of my goals is bringing a more actively approach on this topic.
Writing
From the writing side, I’d say that was an year in average. I have a feeling that I could do it better, but I have some great works this year, like: Increasing Your Friction Area, Implementing Simple Paxos Consensus Algorithms With Rust and RSS and why I love it.
Not considering the drafted posts and this one, it was 10 posts during the entire year. It was in average, better than zero. For the next year, I will be more consistent on that. I think that one of the greatest issues with writing is not trying to writing the perfect article, I need to write, just it. That will be my mantra for the next year.
Next steps for 2025
This as a summary review from my year, for sure there’s a lot of other things that I didn’t mentioned, either because I wouldn’t like to do or because I forgot. And, for 2025, I have a strong feeling that, given my 2024, it will be a better year in all aspects. I have a lot of plans for the next year and I’ll commit in all of them.
From the same thing I said last year, this next year I need to focus on my health. It’s not only about being a healthier person, but, if I want to be a high-performance person, I need to have a healthier body and a healthier mind. That’s why I’ll be doing some checkups and working intensively to improve in this aspect of my life. From the psychological side, I’ll be leaving my social medias for a time and trying to reduce my screentime. As said before, I’m really interested in meditation, I want to see how my mind, that is agitated by nature, will perform after gym and meditation, if I can think better, improve my sleep, and other related things.
Being more organized is other aspect of my life for 2025 that I will being focused on. Having a better scheduled time, will bring to me some improvements on my routine, which implies in having a consistent performance accordingly to the tasks I need to work on. And, looking from the long term perspectivee too, being more organized can give me some useful insights around the things that I worked on during the week, month, quarter, semester or year. Then, I can review and change the direction of something when necessary.
From the point I mentioned above, with that in mind, writing will be one of the core habits I’ll maintain and improve on the next year. Not writing blog posts, but writing my thoughts. Documenting what I did, documenting things that I’m looking on, documenting how I’m doing things, because, in the future, those resources will be the reference for the next annual review, for example. I want to have more quantitative date from my life too, following the idea from Stephen Wolfram here, I want to track my life in quantitative perspective to bring some useful insights about the correlation of data.
My focus for the next year will be more on increasing consistency on good habits, that is, guarantee that the things that I’m doing is coming from a good feedback loop and tha it will have a good return in the long term.
It wasn’t the best year of my life, but I’d say that one of the most importants. I’d like to thanks my girlfriend for this incredible year at her side, I love you so much, I learn a lot from you. Also, thanks for each of my friens that gave me the opportunity to share this year with them, it was incredible.
The next year, for me, will be a year of consistency, reconstruction, maintenance and improvement.
Happy New Year, reader! Hope that, in 2025, I bring a better version of me here.