2024 in review

I wrote most of this post during the week between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day when enough people in New York have left the city that it makes it quite difficult not to turn introspective. It’s been a pretty big year for me and for this blog, so I thought it would be fun to take a look back on the year as we all move into the second half of the decade.

Blog Posts

I wrote four long-form blog posts this year: a fun post on Dune for April Cools and three in my Nix on macOS series. I’ve gotten a ton of really encouraging feedback from friends, acquaintances and internet strangers about my Nix articles.

Somehow my TIL post from November 2023 started ranking well on Google and my site is one of the first that shows up when most folks search for “nix darwin”. I’m proud my writing has been useful to folks. It’s a good reminder that I can find an audience in a niche just writing about what I want to write about before worrying about metrics at all. I still have at least three more posts to write from my original series outline, but we’ll see if I switch tach and write about other things in 2025.

The Newsletter

One of my goals for 2024 was to write more. I’m not always motivated to write deeper long-form technical content that I’m happy to put up on the main blog, though, so I took a page out of Arne Bahlo’s playbook and started a link curation newsletter. It’s a genre that provides structure while still gives me space to express myself, share something interesting, and flex my writing muscles some more.

My blurbs about each link follow a bit more from Simon Willison or John Gruber’s link blogs than Arne’s summaries — I try to add some analysis and sprinkle in nuance where I can. The original goal was to expand some of these blurbs into full blog posts. I haven’t felt the burning desire to do that yet, but we’ll see how next year goes.

The newsletter is called Weekly Links, and after a 52 weeks there’s… well.. 17 entries. The first 10 came quickly and easily, but I started falling off with the habit in early March and ultimately had a six month gap between #12 in early May and lucky #13 in November. I don’t want to beat myself up about not following through with the weekly cadence — I want to make sure I’m writing these for myself first and foremost, and I’ve really been enjoying getting back into the habit of writing.

What I Learned

I barely had enough articles saved up to fill up my first newletter back from hiatus in November. When I sat down to write #14, though, I had more links saved up from the week than I could fit in one post. It’s been a great example of how writing for me is a positive sum activity — the more I write, the more my mind is attuned to finding interesting things to write about.

Discovering positive-sum feedback loops has been the real theme of the year for me. Whether it’s writing each week, running a mile in the morning, or working on interesting projects at work, I’ve discovered first-hand how activity begets energy when you’re working on the right things. I’ve struggled with motivation and energy levels in the past, but this year I’ve learned that sometimes you just need to kickstart the flywheel.

In that vein, the article that’s had the greatest impact on me this year is probably Work hard and take everything really seriously by Tom MacWright (featured in Weekly #6). It helped me crystallize how I’d been feeling around work and leisure time — how “balance” is more complicated than we often give it credit for.

All of these habits may be self-reinforcing in some ways, but they also require active maintenance. My main goal for next year is to do the things that excite me more often.

As always, thanks for reading! I hope everyone had a great new year, and I’m excited to see where 2025 leads.