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January 06, 2025

#2024 Retrospective

I have never done a retrospective, but I've been inspired by a peer at work to start doing a recap of accomplishments, changes, and wishlist items for the future.

#Things I did in 2024

  • Got married. Last year in 2023, I proposed to my now-wife while on an international trip. I had planned out the time and location of the proposal to be done on a beach following an all-day biking excursion; I had even scouted out the exact spot beforehand using Google Maps street view. Unfortunately, the day of was marked by abnormally bad weather; the entire biking excursion was overshadowed by cloudy skies and intermittent rain. By the time we arived to the beach, the sand was muddy and we were wet and exhausted. In the end, I improvised a proposal during a quiet moment while we were visiting a river-side tea town. I forgot my entire speech and even forgot to kneel, but she said "yes". We got married September 14th, 2024, in a small ceremony with only our direct family in my mother-in-law's living room.

  • Bought a house. After getting married, we made the offer to buy the home we were already renting. We managed to get a good deal and even sorted out a seller-financing agreement for the first three years.

  • Adopted Matcha. In June/July, we began fostering Matcha, a 1 year old bengal cat who had fallen from a third-story balcony and required a leg amputation. After a couple of months, my wife had fallen in love with him, and sheepishly asked me if he could stay. I had a hard time saying no. He's a constant trouble-maker, but we love him all the same.

  • Became Engineering Lead. In April of 2024, my boss resigned and recommended me to replace him. It was admittedly nerve-racking since I had never been in any kind of management role. That was over eight months ago now, and I'm happy to say that I've become somewhat used to the role, although I admit that I still prefer being hands-on. I'm very grateful to my wonderful team of engineers, designer(s), and product managers who helped fill in where I fell short.

  • Learned how to ski. In February, I made a trip to Breckinridge, Colorado with my father and father-in-law, and finally learned how to ski. My father-in-law is an avid skiier (sp?) and great teacher. After three days, I got the hang of it, albeit I was exhausted by that point.

  • Made the switch to Fedora with KDE on my work PC. In 2024, I transitioned my work PC to running Fedora with KDE full-time. It has been frankly awesome; Fedora is stable, has built-in Flatpak support, and up-to-date packages in the Fedora repository. And moving to KDE from GNOME has been wonderful, as KDE includes such a large breadth of mature features and customization where the GNOME equivalents would usually come in the form of buggy extensions.

  • Hiked up Grandfather Mountain (kind of). On a trip to North Carolina for my wife's best friend's wedding, we took the time to hike up Grandfather Mountain. The sights and weather were mostly beautiful. Unfortunately, we chose to the day of the ceremony for the hike, and half way through the hike it began raining. A steep cliff climb was made more treacherous by slippery rocks, so we decided to play it safe and turn around to make it to the ceremony without broken bones.

  • Updated the ceiling fan in our office. My mother-in-law had an extra ceiling fan lying around from her employer. My father-in-law volunteered to come over and help me install it. I honestly could not have done it without him. It looks great, and I'm happy with the result.

  • Hosted a holiday party. For seven years, my friends have gathered in South Florida for what has now become a holiday party where we do a Secret Santa and White Elephant gift exchange. As the years have passed, the number of attendees has grown to about fifteen as we began including friends, girlfriends, and spouses. I hung up lights in the backyard, pressure washed the pavers, bought a large used outdoor rug, decorated the home, and made a charcuterie board while my wife prepared a Christmas lasagna, mulled wine and other goodies. My brother constructed a gingerbread house, and other attendees brought more great food and tons of beer. Overall it was a fun time reconnecting with friends I hadn't seen all year.

  • Ran another 5K. I haven't been the best at staying in shape, but this year, my wife signed us up for another 5K. We were both able to beat our times from last year.

  • Stayed at a barn AirBNB. While visiting my brother in West Florida, we stayed a small AirBnB location owned by a couple living on a farm. They had renovated the second floor of their barn to be a cozy little AirBnB location. We spent our time exploring the farm, meeting the goats and cows, donned beekeeper outfits and handled a bee colony, and went to the zoo with my brother and nieces.

  • Got into retro handhelds. For better or for worse, I became obsessed with the retro handheld hobby after a close friend purchased an RG35XX Plus for me as a birthday gift. I purchased multiple devices aftwards including the Anbernic RG Arc second-hand on OfferUp. I even forked an existing firmware and began customizing it to my liking.

  • Did a ropes course. Knowing full well that I'm terrified of heights, my wife bought us passes to a ropes course. Despite my fear of heights, I had a blast (although I should wear more sunscreen next time).

  • Attended an IDLES show. It's been a while since I've seen a band play live, and IDLES made their way down to Ft. Lauderdale this year. I attended with my brother and learned that in my early thirties, I'm not able to mosh for very long before I'm gasping for water.

  • Made strides in organizing the tools in the garage. Our tool storage has been a mess for years. The norm has been to scatter the tools on the floor in the corner of the garage and squat down to look every time we need a tool. I bought a small workbench from Walmart and installed Wall Control panels on the conrete wall. In addition, I installed hooks to the left of the workbench where I now hang ladders. It still needs some work, but it's been a huge quality of life improvement.

  • Bought a chest freezer. We've always struggled with the little space in our main freezer, so we bought a chest freezer from Walmart and installed it in the garage.

  • I began volunteering to transport food to a local high school. Together with my parents, I now volunteer every Sunday to transport near-expired food from Trader Joe's to a local high school.

  • Went white-water rafting. While in North Carolina, I went white-water rafting with my wife for the first time in ~20 years.

  • Attended FIU's Brew Fest. Together with my wife, I attended FIU's Brew Fest, and drank all sorts of delicious craft beer. Even food was included in the ticket, and we enjoyed burgers, croquetas, Argentinian steak, and much more.

  • Ate authentic Thai home-cooked food. I've been to multiple amazing Thai restaurants in the last year, but Gai Chicken and Rice in Fort Lauderdale takes the cake when it comes to making aunthentic home-cooked meals.

  • Completed 12 video games. Hoping I have time to complete more this year.

  • Moved my personal email to Purelymail.com. I've been using Migadu for my personal email since 2019, but this year, I've finally switched over all of my domains to using Purelymail. I was able to make the migration within a couple hours, and have been loving the Roundcube webmail interface so far, greatly preferring it to Rainloop (or its fork).

  • Migrated my personal servers to Caddy. I've been using SWAG for years now to manage my personal servers as it greatly simplifies having to deal with reverse proxies. After some frustration over adding basic auth to one of my apps, I tried out Caddy and was blown away at the simplicity.

  • Simplified my Sublime Text configs. For years, I struggled with finding a way to organize and persist my Sublime Text config across multiple machines. I tried the Sync Settings plugin, then tried manually keeping Gists on Github updated and bookmarked, but was never happy with the setup especially considering I use Sublime Text across Windows and Linux. This year, I've resolved to simply committing the Packages folder to Codeberg, and using (Windows) or (Linux)-suffixed preference files. So far, it has worked fantastically.

#Things I programmed in 2024

  • This year, I moved to using a bunch of my own self-hosted services. I keep a repository of Dockerfiles, Docker Compose files, etc. in a Git repository on Codeberg, which I clone and use across a VPS and my Raspberry Pi.

  • My updates to the Mithril.js Installation document were finally merged. This was a source of pain for several years as the instructions were outdated, referencing an old version of Webpack which led to numerous confused users entering the Mithril.js chat asking for clarification. Along with the doc updates, I created templates for esbuild and rollup.

  • https://codeberg.org/keb/cf-pages-cli - I wanted to deploy some sites to Cloudflare Pages, but found Cloudflare's Wrangler CLI to be absurdly large and complicated for just deploying static sites. cf-pages-cli rewrites parts of Wrangler while vendoring in globrex. The result is a smaller and more focused CLI tool for deploying to Cloudflare Pages, and I've been happy that it's been working great for 9 months now.

  • https://github.com/keb/brrrrrrrrrrr - a fork of a firmware that simply boots into Retroarch for the RG Arc, running the RK3566 chip. It's a minimal but fast solution to playing retro games on the go.

  • https://github.com/kevinfiol/make_readable - Every now and then, I need readability mode in a browser that doesn't support it. This is a Deno app that wraps Mozilla's Readability library, allowing me to quickly get a readable version of a web article regardless of what browser I'm using.

  • https://github.com/kevinfiol/markdown_file_links - In my envy of rich note taking apps like Obsidian, but also my stubbornness to continue using a copy of Sublime Text 3 as my main note-taking app, I built a tiny plugin for Sublime Text 3/4 that enables file links.

  • https://github.com/kevinfiol/youtube-random - I wrote a tiny service that will return a random YouTube video URL for a given channel. I used this to expand https://kevinfiol.com/youtube/ with a "Picks from your subscriptions" section, which helps me discover videos from my existing subscriptions. It's been wonderful so far.

  • https://github.com/kevinfiol/arkive - A personal web archive built with Deno. This has been working just fine for me locally for months now, but has been suffering from feature creep as my original scope has expanded to turn it into a general purpose bookmarks tool. I intend to deploy the minimal version in 2025, and expand upon it with a refactored fork in 2025.

  • https://github.com/kevinfiol/umai-vite - My personal UI library, umai has seen numerous bugfixes and improvements over the last year. In addition, I wrote React Patterns in Umai for those interested in checking it out. In addition, I created a simple Vite template complete with TypeScript to help developers get started.

#Things I plan to do in 2025

  • See the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park. For our "honeymoon", my wife and I will be renting a camper van, and traveling through Arizona, Utah and Nevada to see the Grand Canyon, Zion, and other amazing sights.

  • Install new blinds in the office. The blinds in the office currently let in far too much light and heat, making the workday uncomfortably hot in the afternoon. I've already ordered new blackout celullar shades and intend to install them soon.

  • Install an irrigation system and place new sod in the backyard. The backyard has needed a redo in a while. I hope to be able to rip up the old pavers, and start fresh.

  • Do a rock-climbing course. My wife got me a pass to a rock-climbing gym for Christmas. While I'm still afraid of heights, I'll be happy to share the experience and memories with her.

  • Deep-dive into Postgres. I used continuing education funds to purchase Mastering Postgres. Hoping to learn some tricks to improve the scalability of my applications.

  • Get back into gamedev. I took a pause from gamedev for a couple years, but this year I hope to get back into LOVE2D and Lua while learning some essential gamedev math from Freya Holmér's YouTube course.

  • Build a micro-CMS with Redbean. This is something I've started and have a lot of momentum with already going into 2025. I've been wanting to build something significant with Redbean for a while, and I'm making great progress so far. I hope to build the Markdown-based CMS system I've always wanted.

  • Start practicing guitar again. While I love playing songs on my guitar, my skill level has plateaud for several years now. This year, I'm looking forward to jumping back into the Justin Guitar advanced courses and seeing if I can take my playing to the next level.

  • Switch my personal PC to Linux. This year, I hope to finally move my personal PC from Windows 10 to Fedora KDE. For years, I have stayed on Windows for video game compatibility. This year, I intend to go all-in on Proton and finally modernizing my personal PC development environment.

  • Finalize and deploy arkive. As mentioned, it's working well, but I would like to limit the scope of it this year and deploy an MVP.