2024 was a turbulent and difficult year for me. I went through a lot of changes which resulted in me staying a little tense throughout the year and made me constantly struggle to keep any kind of rhythm.
Like the year before, I had a rough plan for this year which I can look back to. The plan was vague in the beginning but got clearer as time went by. This is natural as I want to plan in ways that allow room for a lot of changes as the year goes by. This post is my year end review with respect to the said plan.
1. What I worked on?
At my workplace (Skit.ai) I primarily led shipping LLM based voicebots to our customers earlier in the year. On the sidelines, we built an experimental multi-modal LLM. An important discussion that happened was around the moat of our product since the Conversational AI stack was getting democratized at a fast pace. This discussion around product differentiation went to a conclusion which, I believe, is the right way to go forward. But around mid of the year I left my job, so I can't comment more on this.
After leaving my work, I mostly did small personal projects in an attempt to get back my tech fluency. I worked on a few ideas around conversations that were active in my mind but then quickly lost interest, probably because of some mental fatigue around this field.
Since I had time, I spent (wasted) some of it on redoing my Emacs config and theme from scratch. This further led me to an Emacs Lisp rabbit hole where I picked up some of my old ideas. One of them was around dictation which came up on HN frontpage and led me to a few threads of work around it. Additionally, based on some work on my note-taking workflow in Emacs, I ended up giving a talk in EmacsConf which led me to play around with a bit of C later. In turn, working with C revived my interest in Rust, which is something I am carrying forward.
Other than Emacs, another time-sinkhole was self-hosting. After solving my needs via self-hosted apps on DigitalOcean, I got an N100 based mini-PC where I moved all of my data and applications. I am still setting up backups and might write a post later once things are stabilized.
I wanted to experiment with a few ideas in my app for note taking since I believe the state of text editing interfaces on phone is dismal. But I was not able to do much around that. Now since the app also needs some refresh, and I have time to study Kotlin more, I will start work on this again. None of the hardware related ideas saw light of day. I specifically was planning to work on an alternative energy setup (mostly pedalling based) to power my workstation, and to make my pi-zero writerdeck usable.
A few more things that I worked on can be seen on my blog and journal.
2. Reading and Writing and Studying
One of the signs of being stuck at work was that I did not need to learn something truly challenging. So after leaving, I started getting back to some philosophy, a few ideas in linguistics, and some evolutionary biology. Although none of the studies were deep enough, they have set me up for further work.
Other than that, I had a decent year of reading and writing.
3. A few Hobbies
I made some non-trivial progress towards a few of my hobbies this year.
Firstly, I cooked a lot–mostly Indian cuisine. I made things that I earlier thought to be super complex and learnt a lot by making variations of the base recipes. I want to experiment more since I find cooking to be populated with a lot of follow-these-exact-instructions tropes that I absolutely detest. A lot of knowledge in this field has been either non-scientific or non-scientifically acquired.
I used to do art (mostly sketching) when I was younger. This year, for around a month, I tried following /r/SketchDaily and it was very meditative. My main motivation was to learn watercolor and I had a lot of fun while doing so. I spent around 30-60 minutes per day for around a month.
I also somehow ended up spending a healthy amount of time on fountain pens. Earlier in the year I bought a restored Waterman Ideal No. 52 from Fountain Pen Hospital. Later this year I attended a pen show in Bengaluru and got a handmade pen from Ranga Pens. After that I found a book that told more about the history of pen manufacturing industry in India, which led me to The Pen Co in my hometown of Varanasi. In a nearby town of Kanpur, I found Kanwrite making interesting nibs, of which a got a few. I also fixed one of my regular use pens, swatched my inks, and spent time journaling and sketching with more of my pens.
4. Personal
I moved house around October. That took a lot of energy and halted some documentation-dependent work since my address proof was in limbo for a while. With this move, I also had to leave my old area where I have been staying for the past 5 years.
Work was pretty dry. Primarily because of discussions around my exit. A few months before and few months after that were just messy. Additionally, I went through a mini identity crisis since it took some time to develop my sense of worth without a formal role and some serious responsibilities.
One nice thing after leaving my job was me finding a sweet spot for meeting people. I have looked at words like 'networking' extremely cynically, but when I had no constraints and incentives, I enjoyed occasional meetings with friends and interesting people around me, either individually or in meetups and events. I occasionally started showing up at Nemo's cowork and that's been a pretty good anchoring point too.
Like the previous year, I travelled well in 2024. A bunch of friends got wed so I attended a few weddings. My sister got wed too, that kept me busy at the tail end of the year. While at Skit, I travelled to NYC, Vegas, and Valley earlier in the year. I also went to Kochi again and did a short horse riding lesson in Coonoor which was really memorable.
Very similar to last year, I wasn't able to make any progress towards learning Kannada. Though unlike last year, I made a few hits towards learning to drive. With my partner I registered in a driving school and started taking a few lessons and am continuing to do so.
Just after leaving, I planned to do some tech activism work. But that energy got lost. The only for-cause thing I did was maybe a few donations but nothing substantial. I also didn't think much about my professional future. Although I was planning to come to that problem in 2025 anyway.
I have more free time now and am getting more clarity with every passing day on directions I want to work in. As I am letting spontaneity seep in my life, my plans document is becoming a loose directional document rather than a goal document. I read this as a positive change since very strict planning has not led me to interesting results. And I want to have an interesting next year.