2024 Retrospective

Well another year has past. As is tradition (well since 2022). I like to do a retrospective blog post on how the year went.

In my 2023 retrospective I talked about addressing the “burnout” situation and things I wanted to work on in 2024.

Well I’ve definitively moved past the burnout. In general I’ve done less personal project in 2024, primarily focusing on other hobbies. Traveling and martial arts have been a overall net positive in my life and it gets my mind away from constantly feeling I have to do something technology related all the time.

This year I got to visit six countries. Thailand, Japan (heh), the US (Las Vegas), Denmark, Norway and Sweden! All great trips and unique experiences!

While this is not a travel blog…

I figured I’d share..

I’ve also now been doing Karate and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for over a year now. It’s a great way to focus for an hour or two thinking of only training (hard to think of anything else when yor’re trying not to get tapped…). But interestingly you can look at martial arts at individual problems you can break down and address. Sounds a bit like software development :O, but a tad more physically involved.

Now on the projects side. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve done.

I’ve done a bunch of makes. Featured in the new “Makes of the Month” posts.

These daggers were definitively a highlight.

Also this mask from Ghost of Tsushima was my first multi-part resin project and turned out great

As far as Icarus goes.. Well some ups and downs. The latest rev was updated to an STM32F4 design. And it works! However I seem to have blown some of my rotors. It’s become a little hard and test and costs money to buy parts.

Going forward I want to do more with ROS. So I’ll be focusing on a new project oriented towards that. I’ll return to Icarus as a standalone controller eventually. I’d like to find a way to make contributing to ROS more a part of my everyday job then something I have to do on the side. I have lots of ideas and some grand aspirations. But, alas, we’ll see how that goes.

For 2025, well like I said. Robotics mostly I think. More makes small and large (though perhaps something new that isn’t a sword). I’d also like to doing something with LLMs (probably in the context of my server).

This year wasn’t the redemption year I thought it was going to be. At least not in the way I thought. But it turned out pretty good.