Retrospective, 2024 // Resolutions, 2025
Every year I sit down to write this second post, the first of a new year, without quite knowing exactly what I want to say. Out of everything that has happened over the last twelve months, which two or three events will bubble up and feel important enough – and personally relevant enough – to include?
After so many years working in so-called "agile" software development, it feels natural to refer to any exercise in looking backwards as "a retrospective". The word has become divorced from its implication of taking time to celebrate the life's work of some outstanding individual; it's now an opportunity to discuss what worked, what didn't, and what should be improved on our next go-around. In that respect, I suppose it is actually closer to the intention underlying the setting of future resolutions – an attempt to get ever-nearer to the life we think we want to live, via the mechanism of an arbitrary annual iteration.
But first, how did last year go?
2024
There were two big things that happened in 2024, one at work and one outside of work.
At work (insofar as I went anywhere for work; this was probably my most WFH year ever), and after more than six years working within the Customer Service tech team, in February I moved over to join the Platforms team and lead the UX work on a new internal service. After so long working with a somewhat ancient CS UI, it's been liberating to work on something entirely new (which naturally comes with all new interesting problems to solve), and it slots very neatly into my existing focus on internal users, historically a rather under-served segment in our relentlessly customer-focused business. I've spent longer in Figma than ever before, as well as handling all of the research and copy, plus I acquired a new manager, so it's been quite a year of change after spending so long in one place.
Aside from work, I saved up all of my holiday in the first eight months of the year and then spent it in a big, expensive hurry come September, when we took a two-week road trip through Oregon and California. Renting a car in Portland, we drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, through redwood forests and past deserted beaches, to San Francisco and then on (avoiding the forest fires) to Los Angeles. We saw isolated coast towns that looked like film sets, and actual film sets on the Warner Bros backlot; live music, and dead musicians' old houses; failed to finish far too many enormous meals, and drank more coffee in two weeks than I consumed in the rest of the year. The weather was perfect, the flights were on time, and I only scraped the hire car once. Maybe if we start saving now, we can do it again in another ten years.
Partly as a result of the new role, and the huge amount of work required to kick-off the UX aspect of the project, I didn't do particularly well when it came to keeping up with last year's resolutions. The various creative projects I was working on all fizzled out by March; I told myself I was just putting them on hold until July when the bulk of the UX deliverables were due, but by then it was too easy to postpone everything until after our US jaunt in September, and afterwards it was almost the end of the year so why bother? Couple that with some realisations around scope and time commitment (namely that trying to write a book, make music, and design a game all at the same time was not remotely feasible), and I haven't made any progress – or even had a clear idea about what exactly I wanted to do – in any arena for most of last year.
2025
This year, though, will be different (he said naively). Focusing on one large side project at a time is a sensible step, so this year instead of trying to do multiple things at once I'm going to work on just one, namely writing and recording music. I have no ambitions to turn it into a second career, but it's an itch that I've always needed to scratch – and, now that I have the tools and time to do so, one I can pursue for free.
In between working on that project, I also plan to resurrect an idea I had more than 13 years ago, and build a framework to aggregate and store all of my online activity here on my personal site. It's not original, or particularly complex, but I do enjoy having something to write code for now that it's not part of my day job, and it will also mean I can ditch my Digital Ocean subscription (where Ghost runs to host this blog).
Add in some health-related goals, namely losing a bit of weight and addressing a persistent back problem, and those are my New Year resolutions. Once I've rebuilt this site, I might even post updates a bit more frequently, who knows.