This year was strange. Parts of it went exceedingly well, far surpassing not only my expectations but even my hopes. Other parts disappointed, to say the least. Unlike previous years, I am going to keep this a relatively brief review. Feel free to skip past the sections you’re not interested in!
Public Speaking
Summary: A very good year — including one smashing success.
I gave three talks:
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Seeing Like a Programmer: Resiliency, Limits, and Moral Hazards in Software Engineering, at LambdaConf in May. Described by one attendee as “should have been a keynote”!
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The Cutting Edge of Versioning, also at LambdaConf in May.
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Substrate Engineering: Engineering Foundations in a World of LLMs, at StaffPlus New York in September
Each of those was well received; “Seeing Like a Programmer” is the talk I am by far the proudest of so far and had incredibly positive feedback — its reception is the reason I was invited to give a keynote at next year’s LambdaConf!
I was also on two podcasts this year:
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I went back on CoRecursive to talk with Adam Gordon Bell about leaving LinkedIn. The episode was a balancing act: trying to speak honestly about why I left, without smearing anyone. It also got some interesting discussion on Hacker News, which is worth a read!
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I appeared on The Changelog alongside Predrag Gruevski to talk more about SemVer, as a follow-up to my LambdaConf talk on the same subject.
Writing
Summary: Pretty good!
Outside this site, I published a review of A Quiet Mind to Suffer With over at The Gospel Coalition. One other essay I wrote for publication is currently in limbo, but I hope to get it out of limbo sooner rather than later — either published where I originally pitched it, or reworked a bit and published either here or in another Christian ideas magazine.
As usual, though, most of my writing this year was in spaces I own, primarily this site and my music newsletter. Here, I published some 79,667 words, including the final count on this post.1 For my music newsletter, I published another 13,103 words. That totals out to 92,770 words — substantially more than any recent year, and indeed enough to fill a decent-sized book!
More than just the words, I am happy that I ran some experiments this year, like weeknotes, weekly Read the Manual posts, Read the Code posts, and my new approach to noteblogging. Weeknotes proved to be too much, and relatively low value. The Read the Manual and Read the Code posts are good, but even the Read the Manual posts are high enough effort that I do not expect to keep doing them weekly unless I can get the hang of doing them much faster. (I paused them while on a social media hiatus over Lent, because in many ways they’re targeted at social media.) I really like noteblogging and hope to keep it up — but I do need to leave room for essay-writing as well.
There is one more thing to say about writing, but I will leave that to the Professional section below.
Reading
Summary: solid, not exceptional.
This year was solid reading-wise. Unsurprisingly, I read a bit less than last year, but I consistently finished books, including a number I had left in progress for years. I am coming to the end of the year with fewer unread books piled on my bed stand than I have in years, and with a sightline to clearing said bed stand in 2025. (Of course, that requires a good deal of self control, so we will see.)
My favorite reads of the year, in the order I finished them:
Nonfiction:
- How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
- The Guns of August: The Outbreak of World War I, Barbara Tuchman
- The Ordinal Society, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy
- Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, Andrew Wilson
- How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology, Philip Ball
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
Fiction:
- Moonbound, Robin Sloan
- The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien (a book I return to roughly annually, and never regret doing so)
- A Talent for War, Jack McDevitt
As usual, this section does not include my favorite essays of the year, mostly because I have never gotten around to setting up a good way to track that! (Maybe in 2025 I will use Pocket’s “favorites” that way via my Kobo, rather than treating it as a sort of unprincipled “like” button!) It also does not include any poetry, but only because I did not finish my friend Jane Scharl’s lovely collection Ponds.
Notably absent from the fiction list: any theology. That was not an intentional choice; I just did not get there this year: a function of my “omnivorous” reading habits (as long-time friend and erstwhile collaborator Stephen Carradini described it a few years ago). I did start a very slow reread through Michael Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church — one of the perhaps three or four seriously spiritually and intellectually formative books I read in seminary2 — and here at the end of the year also began reading Ephraim Radner’s A Time to Keep, so I expect to have more of this sort in 2025.
Health and Fitness
Summary: A highlight! Also: middle age.
This year I not only achieved my fitness goals, I blew far past them. Far past.
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In May, I ran the Colfax Half Marathon in Denver and utterly surprised myself when I demolished my previous PR, which I set at sea level, by more than a minute and a half — as well as knocking off 3½ minutes from my time the previous fall, over 5 minutes compared to my best previous performance on the same course. (race report)
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In September, I ran the Boulderthon Half Marathon at a pace 13 seconds per mile faster than Colfax… but also ran an extra 5km. Whoops. Still, I came out feeling strong, even if frustrated. (race report)
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In October, I made up for that by running in, setting another PR at, and actually winning the Longview Half Marathon, taking a total of 20 seconds/mile off from my time at Colfax in the spring and finishing at a 6:01/mile pace and finishing in 1:18:47. (race report)
Had you told me at the start of the year I would run even the Colfax time, still less the Longview time, I would have been astonished. I set a goal a couple years ago to run a sub-1:20:00 half marathon before I turn 40, still 2½ years from now, and I assumed I would need to find a flat course at sea level to do it. Now I am wondering if I can crack 1:15:00 on a flat course at sea level!
Whether I can is going to be down to overall health, I think, and that is a bit iffier: I caused myself a nasty bulging disk trying to do some lifting to improve core strength (ironically!) back in late October, and have been only very slowly recovering from it. Happily it has not kept me from running, but I am not entirely well, and it is not totally clear what the treatment plan going forward will entail.
Regardless, I am delighted by how this year went and look forward to hopefully working hard again in 2024, including (if the doctors approve it!) my first-ever full marathon.
Professional
Summary: Some of the biggest wins of my career, and some of the biggest frustrations too.
On the one hand, this year saw me do some of the work I am proudest of in my whole career to date: writing a new chapter of The Rust Programming Language. Sometime in 2025, after we get through revisions with NoStarch, there will be a new printing of the book with updates for the Rust 2024 Edition and, at long last, an introduction to async programming in Rust… and it will have my name on it.
On the other hand, I spent the year interviewing for various jobs and had a thoroughly up and down kind of year. I had a couple offers, but in each case concluded they were not quite right. I had a lot of never-even-got-a-response applications. I took bizarre IQ and personality tests. I had folks say, perfectly reasonably, “We love your work but we need to pause on hiring until later.” I had recruiters ghost me and interviewers not even show up for the interview. I had companies change their mind about exactly what role they were hiring for as we were mid-process. I had multiple cases where I made it to the final part of the interview process only to have the company decide to go with other candidates. Only once the whole year did I get any feedback on why a company did not go forward — from Oxide Computer. Maximum credit to Oxide for that, as well as for a process that, although it was a lot of work, I have drawn on over and over again for other application processes the rest of the year.
It was exhausting.
Happily, I still have some prospects, and some consulting opportunities ahead. I am therefore hopeful for 2025, but goodness has it been a tough haul.
As I told Jaimie when thinking recently about an offer I had back in February, I do not exactly regret not taking it — I would not have gotten to work on The Rust Programming Language if I had, and I continue to believe it would have had some frustrations for me — but I also think it would have been fine if I had taken it. A more recent offer I ended up turning down was a case where there is a version of the role I think I would be phenomenally successful in, but the role as they want it to be is one that would both frustrate me and torpedo important parts of the future of my career. Alas.
I did not “ship” as much as I would have liked this year. I did build some small pieces of tooling around The Rust Programming Language, published a couple small tools, and landed some updates to True Myth, including — after years of thinking about it! — an implementation of a Task type. All of those are good! However, I had a number of other ideas and projects in flight that I simply did not get across the line — not least, the next revision of this site.
The last thing I want to note is how I saw my writing make an impact in the technical space this year. Back in February, I published jj init, my essay on the Jujutsu VCS. GitHub stars can be a misleading metric, but as something of a proxy for general interest in a given tool, they say something, and the star history for jj tells an interesting story:
Obviously I cannot take credit for Jujutsu’s success. Far, far more important than my writing is the tool itself. Without it, there would be nothing to write about. Credit here goes primarily to the team of folks contributing to jj, not me. When I was writing that essay, though, I remembered how much Steve Losh’s writing about Mercurial (especially A Guide to Branching in Mercurial) informed and influenced me back in the early 2010s, and I explicitly aimed to do the same kind of thing for others with Jujutsu. It seems to be working, not least by getting a lot of other people writing about it — some of them with far larger audiences than mine! Jujutsu is still far from mainstream, but I believe that if and is it does go mainstream, my work will have been a real and meaningful part of that.
So again: very up and down! But I am grateful to have had good work all year, and the wins were big wins.
Music
Summary: A lot happening under the surface.
This was a fun year, though not one with a ton of visible output. The big things I did this year on that front were:
- Wrote a Sanctus for Epiphany.
- Wrote 9 minutes more of my first symphony, including finishing the second movement and making good progress on the third.
- Tell everyone I am working on a symphony, after having kept it quiet for the past 3½ years of working on it!
- Participated in an event involving an aerial silks interpretation of my fanfare.
- Composed and released The Desert, a short solo piano work inspired by Lent.
- Set up a new music website and start trying to write and publish more steadily about my work in the hopes of building more of an audience.
I have a fair bit more to say about each of those in this month’s issue of my music newsletter, so go read that for more details, and of course do subscribe if you want to stay up to date on my musical doings!
The Rest of Life
Summary: Steady on.
Things just kind of kept chugging along well for our family and church lives. I honestly do not have all that much to say here, and I think that is broadly a good thing. We now have daughters halfway through 7th and 5th grade, which is astonishing — and they are flourishing, for which we are profoundly grateful. Being their father is a great joy, and it is really special (hardly a rich enough word!) to see them coming into late childhood and standing on the cusp of young womanhood. Jaimie’s
I did little in the way of art photography this year, but I took a lot of photos and videos of our family. I continue to enjoy it when I get to it, but there are only so many hours in the day!
And that’s it for this year! As ever, thank you for reading. Here’s to 2025!