My 2024 in review

I started this year without any expectations. Now that 2024 is almost over, I am happy to report that it has not only met, but even exceeded all those expectations!

In all seriousness, there weren’t that many achievements this year. I am however fairly content with the few things I did achieve:

• I shipped two personal projects this year, Npoleon and Alright.

  Npoleon is a small command-line utility that “scrobbles” tracks (side note: This used to be a popular way to make your own Spotify Wrapped before Spotify was a thing.) played on Dutch public radio stations to Last.fm. Npoleon’s target audience is so niche that I might be its only user, but that’s good enough for me.

  The other project, Alright, is slightly more useful, in the sense that it solves a problem that other people have. It’s a browser extension that adds JIRA ticket links to GitHub pull requests. I haven’t heard any bug reports or other complaints about it, so I guess it’s doing alright.

• I applied for a part-time job as a programmer at HU University of Applied Sciences for shits and giggles and accidentally got myself hired as a researcher. I’m mainly responsible for the development of various web applications for the European AI4Debunk project, which aims to combat disinformation using AI, but I’m also involved in the HU’s Robosub project, which is about building autonomous underwater vehicles that can compete in student competitions.

  The job coincidentally comes with a subscription to Adobe Creative cloud, which is a nice bonus.

• I also got to work with some new technologies in a professional environment. This year’s “firsts” include Rust, ROS, Plasmo, cdk8s, and – strangely enough – Perl. ROS sadly falls squarely into the /r/thanksihateit territory for me, but I have to say, there’s something about writing code that does something “real” in the physical world.

And that’s it for 2024. See you next year!