Year in Review: 2024 into 2025

I'm trying to win the award for "Latest Year in Review". 🏆 I don't know if anyone can challenge me at this point, as it's almost thirdway through the year. But, I've done this in some way, shape, or form for the last eight years now!

Coding

I still write code! Here's my contribution history from 2024 for work:

Any my contributions to personal projects and this website over the same period:

I've been at my current job for four years now, with two of them as a principal engineer. I spend my time solving problems and writing React and CSS. I have the luxury of writing basically any component I need from scratch and creating a custom component system. I feel like it would feel limiting at this point if I had to work within some other design system.

After over a decade of working eight hours a day, it's become harder and harder to spend any time after hours working on side projects or writing for the blog. I enjoy my work and I think it's the best career for me, but keeping my coding time to the morning and afternoon hours prevents burnout for me. I still want to write about interesting things I've discovered here and there, but it's hard to find the time.

I also don't keep up with what's going on in "The JavaScript World" anymore. I rarely remember I have a Bluesky account just because I'm not too into scrolling, and when I do scroll I gravitate to reddit.

Writing

I wrote a few things this year:

• Tables with Fixed Headers and Horizontal Scroll - A surprisingly difficult problem to tackle. I made a full-page datagrid/table component with sorting and filtering of various datatypes, pagination, bulk select, reordering, and fixed headers. I documented what method I went with for the fixed headers here.
• Creating a Keyboard Shortcut Hook in React (Deep Dive) - Everything in React is hooks, so I made a useShortcut hook for some shortcut interactions I built. For fun, I used the Konami code in the example sandbox and made the page look all retro and eighties if you press the key combination.
• Redesign: Version 7.0: Sidebars, light-dark, and Bluesky - I might not always be able to inspire myself to write about code, but I still enjoy tweaking the blog layout and trying to make it look perfect. I'm pretty happy with the current design - the code is really easy to maintain (just one style.css file with light-dark() variables), the table of contents gives you a sneak peak at the content of the articles, and the sidebar highlights some articles I've put a lot of time into.

My goal is to write more small snippets of articles about some epiphany I had or some small problem I solved. I feel like those can be helpful and shouldn't feel like too big of a project to embark on. I'm not very interested in writing complete start-to-finish tutorials anymore, as they're extremely time-consuming, probably feel overwhelming to even read, and much of the preamble feels repetitive.

Gaming

2024 was a big gaming year! The year started off strong with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is one of my favorite games of all time, as well as Hollow Knight, so I'm a big fan of Metroidvanias. Prince of Persia did it really well.

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth was another game I played that came out in 2024, and I was incredibly impressed by it. I'm part of the initial wave of Final Fantasy fans, having played FF7 as an eight-year-old the first time around. (Although I'm one of those obnoxious people who will go on about how FF6 is actually the best one.) Rebirth was great, and we put at least 100 hours into it, doing all the side quests and everything. It's the first JRPG I've played in a long, long time and it was really fun to play one again.

At the tail end of 2024, Marvel Rivals came out, and that's been one of my main hobbies since it came out. It's great to just hop on and be able to jump into a game with a few people and try to climb the ranks. I mostly play strategists and vanguards (healers and tanks) and am working my way through Diamond right now.

Personal

Somehow, sharing your personal life on the internet just isn't the same as it used to be twenty years ago. (I'm old.) Life is good for me. I really enjoy my job, I share my life with a wonderful partner and soon-to-be husband, and we have two adorable kitties. I'm just living my life, doing laundry and taxes. Otherwise, I spend it working, gaming, keeping up with friends, doing projects around the house, and cooking all sorts of things.

I hope 2025 is good to you!