2024 Annual Review

This is my 9th public, annual retrospection, where I summarize the past year and set some structure for the coming year. I find it an incredibly useful practice and, since I love reading others' reviews, it's nice to be part of that movement.

Previous years: 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023.

This year, I'm using a less structured format than before. First I'll list some highlights from the previous year and then I'll outline some plans for the coming year.

Highlights from 2024

It blows my mind to see what I managed to accomplish this year. It feels like it flew by so fast but, summarizing it like this, I did put at least some of that time to good use.

• Grew even stronger relationships
• Executed the vision for my team
• Improved our finances
• Read and learned A LOT
• Launched a new podcast
• Improved my productivity
• Managed to get strong(er)
• Dove deeper into machine learning
• Started two businesses
• Open-sourced two projects

Grew even stronger relationships

After my bout with burnout in 2023, I've doubled down on my relationships and started prioritizing spending quality time with friends and family. Training consistently, socializing often, and sleeping well is truly the magic recipe for my mental health.

Thus, one of my most important changes this year is that I've stopped viewing playing or hanging out with my kids as something that I do with whatever time is over after work and chores. Instead, I plan our weekends so that we do things together and I set aside time almost every day to play games, talk about life, read books, or just goof around.

This relatively small change has led to an even stronger bond between us. It was by no means weak before but it goes to prove the power of wisely and consistently spending your finite resources (time, in this case); a concrete case of the power of The Slight Edge.

Executed the vision for my team

This was my third year as Head of Software Engineering at STIM. One of the many skills I've had to learn in this role was communicating clearly; coordinating my team to achieve deliberate outcomes and align everyone towards a shared vision.

Of course, that requires having a clear vision to begin with. However obvious that sounds, for me it was a revelation how powerful it is to cut away anything but the absolutely crucial and boil the remains down to an almost overly simple message.

This was our plan for 2024:

All new APIs will be implemented using gRPC Connect.

Each application and team is required to have a Datadog dashboard that answers the question: "is everything working well?"

All applications must have (at least) 60% unit test coverage, integration and load tests for their most critical functions, and one or more smoke test.

Our incidents have dropped dramatically from these three mandates, which was our biggest problem during 2023. Mission definitely accomplished!

This past summer, I read The Engineering Executive's Primer, by Will Larson, and realized that his ideas about creating engineering strategies could take this vision initiative to a whole new level. So that's what we're working on for 2025!

Improved our finances

Through continued investing in financial instruments and appreciation in the housing market, I hit a major milestone during 2024, in terms of net worth.

Further, due to the incredible power of compounding interest, our investments are now at a point where their generate more than what we deposit, more than doubling the initial speed of their growth. It's like they've taken on a life of their own — crazy to think about!

Yet, I've realized that this rate of growth isn't fast enough to achieve the lifestyle I want for my family. It will be more than enough for me and my wife to retire early and live well from but, before that, I want to give my two sons an awesome experience as they're growing up.

Long-distance traveling with two kids, a nice house in Stockholm with enough space for us all, or equipment/fees/trips for various sports, this stuff isn't exactly cheap.

Basically, I need more income. How much more? I made some rough estimations and came up with a ten-year plan for financial growth, with milestones for my future birthdays. So now I have something concrete to aim for each year, further

Seeing how much more I will need to earn makes one thing abundantly clear: while I could most likely find a better-paid job, salary won't solve this. I have to focus on building business to be able to scale my earnings better. More on that later!

Read and learned A LOT

I have a rule that I can't fall asleep before I've read at least one page of a book that day. It's a rule I've stuck with for a long time now, my current streak stretching past two years.

One page usually turns into ten or fifty or a hundred. Over time, that means I get to enjoy a lot of reading. 2024 was a peak in this regards, with reading statistics at or beyond any previous year.

My reading goal was 39 books (three books every four week) but I surpassed that, with a total of 67 books read during 2024 — the exact same amount as last year.

While I'm not a huge fan of that statistic — it incentivizes reading shorter books, contrary to what I usually enjoy — I managed to whip together a chart showing the number of pages read, year by year. (Why doesn't Goodreads offer this instead?)

During 2024 I managed a new record of 14'718 pages!

I tend to read in batches, picking a new topic that interest me and then diving deep into it by reading a handful of different books. Plotting those pages across genres and months, it's interesting to see how my reading interest changed over time.

Launched a new podcast

I've been itching to start a podcast for quite some time now. Having done lots of webinars in the past, I'm certain it's a format that will scratch my creative itch.

Thus, this year, I made it happen: say hello to The Open Shelf podcast.

This podcast is basically an excuse for me to get together with my friend, Mehdi Mokhtari, to discuss the books we read and the things we learn from them. By recording and publishing these discussions as podcast episodes, we hope to share our passion for learning and maybe spark something in our listeners.

Check us out on Spotify or YouTube.

Improved my productivity

I've come to realize that I'm naturally a very disorganized person. My thoughts jump from place to place, only to suddenly get stuck in super focus mode on something completely random for an hour or a year, to the complete detriment of everything else.

This natural proclivity to chaos, along with a desire to affect change over a hundred simultaneous projects and maintain a high standard in my many areas of responsibility, has led me to develop some quite intricate systems and processes.

Two of my biggest upgrades to this life framework of mine came after first reading How to Take Smart Notes, which prompted me to start externalizing my knowledge, and then reading Getting Things Done, which helped me structure how I prioritize my time.

2024 saw another big evolution, after reading Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, both by Thiago Forte.

These books helped me expand my "zettlekasten" for external knowledge, into an archive for any useful material that I need to use in a current project or might want to reference in the future; e.g. a "second brain".

Managed to get strong(er)

Just how my shifting focus screws with my productivity, so has it screwed with my fitness and sports progress over the years.

One year I'm training Brazilian jiu-jitsu eight times per week, competing in submission wrestling every month. Next year I'm all in on powerlifting, hardly ever spending a thought on combat sports. Only to then sign up for a marathon the following year, losing all the strength I'd built.

While I can train any of these sports, the reality is that I can't train all of them.

If the book Essentialism taught me anything, it's that you have to turn down a lot of good options in order to really double down on and benefit from the one great option.

For me, the ultimate sport and greatest option is Strongman. It requires a massive amount of strength and muscle mass, which is one of the most important factors in living a long and dignified life, as well as a spoonful of cardiovascular ability, which supports good health.

This leads to some useful conclusions: strength should be the foundation of my training but, at it keeps increasing, I must not forget to also keep my cardio at a decent level, while also working on my mobility (or the ever heavier weights will exacerbate problems stemming from imbalances and stiffness).

And this is how I spent my 2024: growing stronger with all kinds of implements (shoutout to Atlas stones!), huffing and puffing for my cardio (SkiErg from hell), while completely ignoring mobility and thus suffering a nice little spinal hernia in July…

I'm slowly recovering, although my bench has continued to grow throughout the ordeal, and working with a physio to improve my mobility and core strength, so as to avoid future injuries and allow me to grow insanely strong during the coming decade.

Dove deeper into machine learning

After dipping my toes during an innovation sprint at work during 2023, this year I dove deeper. I went through a lot of scientific studies and learned about boosted decisions trees, support vector machines, artificial neural networks, random forest, and many hybrids thereof.

Concretely, I added pandas and sklearn to my toolbox. I haven't touched Python is over a decade but found a superpower in Gemini for Google Colab, which helped me learn the two ML libs much, much faster than I would otherwise have managed.

Speaking of generative AI, I also had a lot of fun with Fooocus this year.

Started two businesses

Armed with the realization that I need something more than salary and investments to reach my financial goals and spurred on by entering my fifth decade on this earth, I began to seriously build a business.

I won't repeat the details of this journey but suffice to say that it's been anything but straight, first leading in the direction of resuscitating Athlegan, my online fitness coaching for vegans, and then towards Gymbrain, an AI-based tool for gym owners.

Through this winding path, I'm happy to have been accompanied by insightful works like The Lean Startup, Escaping the Build Trap, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Nail It then Scale It, Running Lean, and The Mom Test.

All those books have helped me focus on the sequence of 1) identifying a group of potential customers, 2) figuring out a joint problem of theirs, 3) solving that specific problem without unnecessary bloat, and 4) productizing it all as integrated offers, marketing, and pricing.

I'm still oscillating between #2 and #3 but I'm glad I didn't jump ahead, like many times before, and wasting time and effort by simply hoping that all my ducks magically have gotten in a row by themselves.

Open-sourced two projects

Finally, this year I kept programming and managed to release two open source projects:

• csvmerge is a terminal-based tool to join two or more CSV data sources.
• go-truecoach is a library for integrating with the (unofficial) TrueCoach API.

Plans for 2025

As I've mentioned in previous reviews, I'm not a big fan of year goals. There's no way we can even approximately guess how far we can get in one year, or even if it's a direction still relevant twelve months from now.

Instead, starting last year, I create more vague "intentions" for the year, like overarching themes to focus my efforts. Further, I break these down to one per big life category: spiritual, mental, physical, social, resources.

• SPIRITUAL: I want to make sure that I live by my values to the highest degree possible. I want to find more ways to apply my principles in daily life.
• MENTAL: I want to continue studying one area at a time. I want to prioritize processing the books I read, organize my thoughts for the whole area, and apply what I learn.
• PHYSICAL: I want to be proud both of how my body performs and what it looks like. I want to be a great example of vegan fitness and give my wife something nice to look at.
• SOCIAL: I want to maintain and strengthen my friendships, I also want to set a good example and be a role model for my children, in terms of socializing.
• RESOURCES: I want to continue to grow our investments, while adding more income streams and new long-term assets.

What I'm trying differently this year is the come up with a series of monthly challenges to make these intentions more concrete. I have found that daily reminders of what is important helps me stay consistent long-term, plus it's fun to challenge yourself. ;)

Curious how I get on during 2025? Subscribe and I'll keep you updated!