As we round the corner into the new year, I just wanted to reflect on some of my happenings in 2024!
THAT TX 2024
I attended THAT Conference in Round Rock TX for the second time this year, and gave my second talk. This talk was all about using Docker to build custom GitHub Actions, two topics I love to talk about!
A big takeaway for me was that some content is not well suited to a talk. I felt that I tried to cover too much in too little of time.
Beyond the talk, I met up with some of my favorite people in the world and met some new people like Ryan Furrer, Chris Nowicki, and Kevin Powell.
New job, who dis?
In March, I was very unexpectedly laid off from my previous job at PlanetScale. After taking it in, I quickly got to work trying to use the connections I have to line something up.
Just as unexpectedly, I got a call the same day from Derek Briggs, the head of design at Clerk and former coworker at PlanetScale. He quickly lined up a call where I was told "we want you to do exactly what you were doing at PlanetScale, but for us" and I received an offer in about 30 hours.
I feel like this moment was years in the making. I started creating content about my craft in 2019 and always called the process "building a war chest" in case I ever needed to find a job.
Months later at an offsite, Derek told me something that really stuck with me:
"It's not what you know, it's not who you know, but it's what people know about you."
This line put so many things into context since Derek and I didn't work too closely, but my reputation and quality of work showed.
Since then, I've had the opportunity to go on some really amazing work trips. I went to Oregon to represent Clerk for Jason Lengstorf's Web Dev Challenge, Aspen, CO for a marketing offsite, and was able to attend Next Conf for Clerk in San Francisco.
Working for Clerk has been an incredible opportunity and something I hope to build on for many years to come!
I moved back to IL
At the end of 2022, my family uprooted from our home in Illinois to move to rural Kentucky. With three boys, we figured they'd enjoy the 17 acres we purchased to use for play. However, it didn't fit with us quite like we expected.
The freedom to do what we want with so much land was pretty awesome, but the kids didn't use it nearly as much as we thought. What we didn't expect is the cultural differences either. Being in a more rural area, there weren't as many kids around to play with ours, and families within a reasonable distance didn't have much interest in setting up play dates. Our kids also missed heir grandparents a ton too.
As a spiritual person, I started praying for some answers and direction. While attending the 2023 Thanksgiving service at our church, I felt called to move back to IL, so we started prepping our house to move and looking for homes.
We signed a contract to have a house built right before I was laid off, which obviously made that experiences much more impactful. It wasn't a super fancy home, but it was the same price as a house that's 20 years old so we figure it was a better move if we can wait out the build time.
2024 is the year we executed the move though. We made three separate trips with moving trucks to move our stuff into storage, keeping the bare minimum out for us to live on. We sold our Kentucky home in June and moved in with my parents for a few months while the house was being finished.
The kids started school in August, about a month before the house was scheduled to be finished, so my wife and I would drive them an hour to school every day and work at coffee shops all day. We finally moved into the new home in September, and it's been great since.
There are a ton of fields and parks near our home, and since the school is in the neighborhood, there are also a lot of other kids that mine can play with.
I started this story off talking about my spirituality because having performed a second cross-country move in two years isn't exactly a good time. I prayed a lot on this to determine if this was really the best way forward for our family and have consistently felt that it was, and in hindsight it was.
As crazy as 2024 was, God took care of our family. We're definitely happier where we are now, and even more than when we previously lived in IL!
Things I shipped
Daily Reps
A few weeks ago, I finally launched my first iOS app. Daily reps is a workout tracker for people who want to hit a daily number of reps for a specific workout. Say you’re trying to set a goal of doing 100 pushups a day, but don’t necessarily care when they get done. Daily Reps is built around this core idea, you can easily track a number of reps you do in a specific session, and it resets the next day.
This is a concept I’ve been building on for some time, and when work asked me to learn React Native to write for the Expo blog, it finally became a reality!
SpaceCharter
SpaceCharter is a concept that I actually started in 2023. When I was hosting Twitter spaces a lot, trying to schedule a large number of guests was problematic, so I built a system that lets people suggest time slots and the tool helps the host determine the best one that works for everyone.
It also had a collaborative text editor for coordinating show notes and planning the conversation.
I plan to expand on this concept in 2025 but only after I’ve spent a solid amount of time iterating on Daily Reps.
Content
As a content creator, I couldn't close out this section without talking about some of my favorite content I produced in 2024. I think I produced some of my best work this year.
Combining the benefits of session tokens and JWTs This was the first big post I was asked to create at Clerk. I had to work with quite a few technical folks in Clerk (including the CEO) to understand the intricacies on how Clerk has combined the best of both authentication approaches for our solution. I felt that I distilled quite a large number of technical topics into something concise and digestible.
Building a React Login Page Template This post walks readers through how to build session authentication into a React + Express application step by step. I loved writing this because there are a lot of moving parts that need to be structured in a specific way to make sense, something I felt I did very well with this post.
It also has a repository that readers can use to step through the code themselves, as well as a template that can be used to build with!
fullstack.chat podcast revival I started a podcast in 2023 under the fullstack.chat name. It was a semi-regular Twitter space that I'd record and put on YouTube. Well this year I went full-blown podcast mode and started doing live video recordings.
Check it out on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
On the topic of burnout
I’m terrible at burning out, and this year really hit home on that. I constantly think I can take on the world and overcommit in a regular basis. When I read Slow Productivity this year, the term “administrative overhead” stuck out at me.
It’s the extra stuff you need to track for a given project that’s still required but hard to see. Even after reading that I still found myself committing to too much.
One thing I’ve learned about myself is that new environments excite me. That excitement is hard for me to reign in, so I create a ton of ideas that I want to execute on, but in reality I simply don’t have time to move all of them forward without sacrificing some of the quality of my work.
I plan to expand on this more in a future post, but ultimately the end of 2024 found me trying to close all my open loops so I can start fresh in 2025. No new ideas have been started on in December, just constantly working towards finishing what I started. It’s a good practice itself, but something I need to do more consistently.