My 2024

A bit of a mixed bag this year with some great adventures offset by some stuff out of my control I had to bounce back from

I went to New Zealand

Seeing the Southern Lights has been on my bucket list for the last five years and I had read that 2024 and 2025 were going to be years with a high amount of solar activity which makes for strong aurora so I made a plan in 2023 to go to New Zealand to see them.

We actually started 2023 by going to Iceland to see the Northern Lights again for my 35th birthday in January, having last seen them in 2011 and then planned and booked the New Zealand trip later that year.

But as with most holidays that are booked way in advance you forget all the work that you need to do prep for them, panic and get everything sorted a couple of months before and then panic as the start of the holiday creeps forwards because you’re sure you forgot something.

Luckily I didn’t forget anything and we were really well prepared for the trip and it was amazing.

We landed in early June in order for our trip down to Stewart Island to give us the best possible chance of seeing the Southern Lights and spent just shy of a week in Aukland as our first stage of the trip, visiting Hobbiton and the many attractions in that area.

Next we flew down to Invercargill and from there to Stewart Island where we spent 5 days living in a really nice cabin in the rainforest, it was the most remote place I’ve ever been to and a trip out to Ulva Island topped that with me being one of just seven people on the entire island.

Ulva Island was really fun, walking through the wilderness and taking pictures of the wildlife, it really made me realise how fun photography be. Stewart Island’s nighttime weather however wasn’t clear enough to see the Southern Lights the one night it was strong enough so unfortunately I didn’t get to see them.

After Stewart Island we flew back to Invercargill where we spent a couple days enjoying some re-urbanisation before flying to Wellington where we didn’t stay long as we were flying back out the next morning to Dunedin to jump on a bus to Oamaru to go see some Little Blue Penguins and I was able to get some really good pics of them before we headed back to Wellington for the last stage of the trip.

Wellington had a lot to experience including the Weta Workshop Tour and a lot of museums but I was definitely left wanting to explore the more remote side of New Zealand towards the end as the city was too noisy after experiencing the dark and silence of Stewart Island.

New Zealand was an amazing place and while I didn’t actually see the Southern Lights this time it’s got me wanting to go back so I’m hoping to do so at some point in the future, I was going to try in 2025 but something else happened this year that meant I can no longer plan for that.

I was forced back into entrepreneurship

At the start of the year I had a bit of bad news around my day job but in a way that stark reminder that nothing is safe gave me the kick up the arse I needed to get back on the entrepreneurial horse.

I had a couple of ideas that I wanted to execute but I also decided that I wanted to target iOS and MacOS this time around. Having previously built a React Native app for Android and iOS and also building a web app, I came to realise that the Apple ecosystem would simplify a lot of the platform side of things and allow me to build the idea instead of building the platform and the idea.

I started with an idea I had for a while which was to turn the approach that I had for managing my todo list into an app. I used to have 19 todo lists which covered the next 7 days, the next 6 weeks and the next 6 months which allowed me to see my todo lists at different levels of time.

This idea turned out to be a bit harder to do than I had expected because not only was I learning Swift, SwiftUI and SwiftData but I was also learning the logic behind the idea and dates are really hard to work with.

So I decided to revisit an older idea — JiffyCV, the React Native app that I had written previously. As I knew how the logic for that app worked I figured it would be a good way to learn SwiftUI and SwiftData and it was but the idea I came to realise wasn’t that good, as since I had the idea in 2016 the art of writing a CV has changed due to AI.

So I pivoted my idea away from writing a CV to solving the underlying cause of the problem around not taking the time to reflect on the successes and challenges that people face when at work. These experiences are ultimately what make their way onto a CV and are what come up in interviews so it felt like the right area to target.

Since then I've named this idea Garner and I’ve got the app into a public beta where I’m iterating on the idea and getting it ready to launch in 2025.

I went to some great gigs

A couple of my favourite bands played in the UK this year.

I was able to see Cattle Decapitation play up the road in Leeds, it was my first time seeing them and they were everything I was hoping for, absolutely epic blackened death metal and the atmosphere matched.

A month of so later I got to see Revocation support Aborted, Revocation are my favourite band and I hadn’t seen them before and I think that gig may have been my favourite.

Revocation played a tight set and the crowd reacted well to it with the mosh pit stopping to stand and admire the technicality of the solos being played. Then Aborted came out, called the out the UK for having a high obesity rate and had us doing star jumps in the pit.

I yet again failed to see Sylosis however. It seems to be a running thing with that band where I buy tickets to see them and then something awful happens the day before the gig. It’s happened 3 times now! This year it was me receiving bad news about my job the day of the gig that meant that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to go.

I haven’t seen them yet but this year was also when I found out that Revocation are going to be supporting Cattle Decapitation in 2025 so I’ve got tickets to see that!

I quite my ADHD meds cold turkey

There’s been a scarcity of methylphenidate hydrochloride (branded as Concerta or Ritalin) in the UK this year and while I was able to secure a months worth of it for my New Zealand trip since I’ve been back I’ve been unable to secure any.

This ultimately meant that in August I started to quit the medication cold turkey and it was not a fun experience.

When I started on Concerta in mid-2023 it made it really easy to switch from drinking loads of caffeine to taking the pills and drinking decaf. I didn’t have the caffeine withdrawal I’d experienced in the past, the pills just slotted in whatever gap that the coffee was filling and it was all good.

Taking the pills instead of drinking coffee had a bunch of benefits to me, I was able to get into “working” state easier as the pills felt like being at the level a couple of coffees would give me almost immediately and they would last for 12+ hours without the need to top up my caffeine levels. They also helped regulate my sleep as the pills would wear off around the time I aimed to be going to bed so that combined with a nice warm bath would send me right off.

As you can imagine going from a nice balance that the pills gave me back to coffee wasn’t great. I would feel tired a lot and where I had been drinking decaf I had forgotten the other effects that coffee had on my body and where I was trying to get back into my old side-hustling ways and balance various parts of my life while going through all this I ended up feeling quite low.

I think I’ve come out the other end of it now as my energy levels feel in a better place but I am finding it harder to focus on getting into the zone when working on things, however this may be due to me needing to communicate my needs better than the work being hard.

I will have to see how 2025 treats me, my biggest hope is that having been off the meds for a while my internal voice comes back as taking the pills killed it and while it was the thing distracting me the most it was also the thing that made me creative and also helps with rejection sensitivity as one of the hardest parts of being medicated was being forced to confront life without my brain being able to shield me from the shit bits with distractions.

I spent more time with the Leeds Dev and Tester Community

This year saw the return of a morning meet-up that I attended in the times before Covid which while I’m no longer equipped to get up at 7am I really enjoy going to so I’ve been trying my hardest to drag my butt out of bed in order to go to that before work and start the day having already achieved something.

I did a talk at Leeds Testing Atelier on User Flow Mapping which I think was informative to some people, I definitely enjoyed designing the slides for it but I have yet to watch myself deliver the talk so I can’t say how much justice I did the content on them.

I also did a little JS Horror story telling for the October edition of LeedsJS which was fun and got people talking about some of the things contained within it.

Outside of talking though I’ve continued to help run LeedsJS and Ministry of Testing Leeds and both have been well attended in 2024. I also went to my first Leeds Mobile after attending Swift Leeds and went to a couple of Leeds Software Leadership events.

Talking of Swift Leeds, I went to my first Swift Leeds this year and learned a lot about iOS and MacOS development as well as made everyone regret giving me the mic at karaoke as part of the after conference party.