2024 Wrap Up

  • Coding
  • Resolutions

What a big year! There's a lot to look forward to in 2025, but as always I want to take a moment to look back on how the past year went.

Personal life milestone

I mentioned this bit of personal news briefly in last month's blog post, but it warrants repeating here. In early November on a cold day in Amsterdam, I woke up super early to go out and get some pastries and some flowers, and I asked my long-time partner Tessa to meet me at Vondelpark. We got some coffee, walked around the park for a bit, then found a lovely bench near a pond with some ducks swimming around, and I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. She said yes, and I couldn't be more excited to spend the rest of my life with my best friend and the person who brings me all of the happiness in the world. Tessa, I don't think you read this blog, but if you do come across this, I love you dearly.

Music

A lot happened on the musical side of things too this year. I clocked in 21 shows across nine different projects, including a new group, F.L.O.W., sitting in with soundcult and Water Damage, and a few impromptu collaborations as always. Some highlights:

  • Performing solo at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired
  • Soundtracking the total solar eclipse as it crossed over Austin
  • Future Museums opening for Graham Reynolds in the gorgeous Gaslight-Baker Theatre in Lockhart
  • Performing with Water Damage in the Netherlands, including on the day that I proposed to Tessa

I was featured on several recordings as well! Check them out, purchase them, support my friends and collaborators:

Lots more to come in 2025!

From the blog

It was a bit of a hodgepodge across the blog this year. On the JavaScript fundamentals side of things, I challenged myself to detail every way I could think of to copy all of the values from one array into a new array, and then explored various data fetching strategies: XHR, Fetch, and Axios.

On the React side of things, I wrote about Custom Image Loaders in Next.js, explored data fetching within React, and walked through a little typewriter text effect.

I also continued on with creative musical coding. I attended a Write Music with Code! Workshop at Dada Lab hosted run by Dan Gorelick and Viola He, and I explored a bit of the Web Audio API, both in standard JavaScript and in React.

Lastly, I finally ditched my old Gatsby, styled components, Netlify blog tech stack, and redesigned this blog in Next.js App router, CSS modules, deployed to AWS Amplify. A part of me is sad to see the old stack go, but I am really digging the new stuff. I also want to say that I am so sad about the sunsetting of Google Domains and the semi-forced migration of my domain management to Squarespace. Woof.

Professional Development

On the professional development side of things, I was recently accepted into the Contentful Developer Hero program. This is a great opportunity for me and a cohort of other developers that work with Contentful to share our knowledge, tips, tricks, and advice with the broader developer community. Definitely more to come on that front, so stay tuned in 2025!

Looking Forward to 2025

In last year's wrap up blog post, the one thing I explicitly said that I wanted to do in 2024 was to finish Joshua W. Comeau's Joy of React course. Sadly, I wasn't able to complete it this year, but I am very, very close. I have one last module and one last project. I will finish this course in 2025.

Beyond that, there is a ton coming down the pipeline, much of which I've mentioned above. New music, working with the Contentful Developer Hero program, iterating on the design and deployment of this website, continuing to explore the Web Audio API and livecoding, and always continuing to learn and share. It'll be a big, awesome year, and I look forward to seeing it with you.

Happy coding and happy 2025,
Joey