I should have written more

Close to a year since my last ramble (coincidentally also during the end of year break) I have decided I have things to say about 2024 and this is a decent medium for it.

I started Keeping The Lights On with the intention of cataloguing my thoughts in a way that would result in less rants around the work lunch table. I failed with this ambition and as you’ll gather from this post I’ve never had more on my mind.

There is a side effect to such a busy 2024 - I am coming into 2025 feeling primed to create more.

Written content like what you can find on Substack is becoming more and more valuable amongst the sea of brainrot we endure on a day to day basis. I’m not immune to a cursed Instagram algorithm, but platforms like this have helped with keeping the doom-scrolling at bay and engaging with the internet in a more meaningful way is something I’d like to do more of in 2025.

It may be through a different platform, but I do love writing and would like to consider this post another attempt to jump-start the habit. Let’s shoot for a grand total of two articles in 2025, anything more is bonus points.

I stepped up professionally

As of August, I have been at my current company for 4 years. In April I was promoted into the role of a Technical Team Lead. Since then I’ve had to oversee a lot of change both at a squad and company scale, overseen multiple big project deployments whilst also making it abundantly clear I’d like to not do a garbage job of this role in the process.

The role has been challenging, but incredibly rewarding. An iterative change which I don’t think will ever be “done”. Nevertheless, there are 40 hours in a working week and I am confident that I am putting my effort in the right places to get the right results.

This could be entire article on the transition to management but I’m not even sure I have the right answers. This is not my first time in a leadership role but historically I was a “big fish in a small pond”. There is a mindset shift required when working with companies which process a meaningful value of transactions, where I have struggled is towing the line between “you cannot afford to screw this up “ and “chill out, we’re not saving lives”.

My biggest achievements in 2024 professionally can be broken down to:

1. Getting talented people the recognition they deserve

2. Ensuring people new to the industry have the tools and skills to succeed

3. Reducing chaos

I’m appreciative not only of my employer and manager for enabling me to do this, but also the talented people in my team. It’s a great feeling helping people gain promotions and it’s been the most fulfilling experience I’ve had at work in a long time helping new talent establish themselves when so much of the industry is thinking of creative ways to make them obsolete.

Part of me feels by stepping back from the tools, I am happier because my job is less coupled to my passion of programming.
I spend more time in Jira than I do a text editor these days.
The shift in where your priorities are catches many people off guard and admittedly does have me wondering how much of a Tech Lead versus Engineering Manager I am.

All that aside, I’m not splitting hairs on the specifics of the role. My job being more of a job and less of a monetised hobby has been insanely positive for my mental health, professional outlook and work-life balance. “If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life” - I have tried, I come to the realisation this is far removed from reality. That said, I don’t think the logical counter-advice is “never do something you love as a job” - there has to be a median statement I’m just unsure what it is.

The picture I’m trying to paint with all of this is I had a great year professionally and a big reason was the emphasis on softer, less technology oriented, development. If anyone who works with me is reading this I’m appreciative for your understanding and support.

I rekindled my passion for tech

With work becoming more of a job the other side of the coin is computers became more of a hobby again. This was not in pursuit of the next big side hustle, quite the opposite. The goal was to tinker, mess around, learn something for the sake of learning not for the sake of potential upskilling.

One piece of advice I’d provide for anyone who wants to code in their free time is approach learning like this. You’ll often find you walk away from the whole exercise with legitimately useful knowledge that could apply to your professional life.
People who work in tech are in a great position where they can set the foundations of their career from a personal computer. Do not let this subsequently lead to the career burnout - there is no need to be constantly productive.
Amongst the busyness of life even being able to read up on new C# language features off a Reddit post or watch a conference talk on YouTube is setting you apart from others.

If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong no good or bad and creativity is just free play with no rules it's easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin was a read that stuck with me this year as in a roundabout way it applies what makes my interests so captivating. Computers are a fantastic tool for making things and removing the guard rails of what I should expect from my time with them helped greatly in developing my hobbies.

I made a bit in 2024, to summarise some of my personal achievements:

1. I learn the basics of Go and built a Spotify → Apple Music playlist transfer tool for my own personal use. Go is an amazing language, I will take any opportunity to write it and highly recommend people give it a go.

2. I wrote a small roadmap for Web Development which is available on my GitHub for free

3. I tried out a tonne of new web technologies and built a website for my partner’s business (more on that later)

4. I learnt 3D modelling in another attempt to support my game development aspirations

Part of how I was able to do more with computers in my spare time has been active efforts to enjoy computing more. Windows continued to become even more unusable after my early year sook piece and so to the detriment of everyone who talks to me regularly I moved to Linux as my daily driver. I made the switch in June to Linux Mint and shortly moved to Fedora thanks to the great work being done by the Nobara Project. The move allowed me to get a whole new lease on life out of a second hand desktop with relatively performant but outdated parts.

What this move has taught me is I will deal with minor inconveniences if it means I get to use software that gets out of the way. You don’t realise just how much of the device you own is wasted on the garbage you run on it.

It may sound weird, but I’ve relinquished convenience in favour of simplifying how I use my technology. I’m fine with some of my notes not constantly syncing to the cloud if it means the app boots up near instantly and runs fine no matter internet connection. The minor incompatibilities of that come with a Firefox based browser are okay if I can avoid whatever the hell Google and Microsoft are doing with Chrome and Edge respectively. My open source creative software is worth the missing features if I’m only using it for basic functionality and can avoid the hefty subscription fee.

I know this way of thinking is not something that should be expected of everyone but next time the software you use causes you frustration, look at the alternatives. If you are a fellow developer especially, many of the maintainers of these alternatives are individuals and small teams who would love both a user base and donations if you can afford to do so.

Here are some of the initiatives and pieces of software I now use and have donated to:

1. Nobara Linux - maintained primarily by a single developer based on the well supported Fedora Linux by Red Hat

2. KDE - providing a desktop that rivals and in many cases outdoes what was offered in Windows 11

3. Zen Browser - the best browser I’ve used, based on Firefox and somehow developed by one person

4. Excalidraw - an amazing white boarding tool with a fantastic free tier if you don’t want to pay for it

A combination of a better approach to my side projects and the way I treat software resulted in 2024 being the year where I was excited about computers again.

I helped build something special

My partner Maddy started a business in 2024 - Equine Alchemy is a nutrition consultancy for horses which I have learnt through being with Maddy is something there is market for as horses are character building creatures to own.

This is something that she has been doing in her spare time as a way to make use of all of the learning from owning her own horse along with some tertiary education.

As part of this I helped her build her website, it didn’t need to be anything ground breaking but the simplicity of the task was something that was quite appealing.

What was unique is that a static site wasn’t going to fully cut it as a consult form was something Maddy wanted to incorporate into the site. Whilst there are a lot of paid CRMs that could integrate with this requirement and redirecting to a Google Form might also have done the trick, she was happy to let me cook something up that was a little more integrated into the site.

I can’t stress how fun this was as a little project, it was entirely a learning experience and the resulting stack was mostly comprised of technologies I’d never used before:

1. Astro for the website

2. Pocketbase for the backend

3. Hosting on an AWS Lightsail Linux VM

4. CI/CD via GitHub Actions

The stack is simple, doesn’t overcook the management of the site and takes advantage of some pretty powerful features.

Astro has been incredibly helpful for providing a slim layer of serverside code to interface with the Pocketbase API as well as providing consistent plugins and functionality for consistent SEO and site tagging.

All the dynamic content in the website such as the about and services page as well the storage of consult requests has been handled by Pocketbase. Using the Go that I had learnt at the start of the year I was able to write a “hook” which sends emails to both Maddy and the client when a new consult is requested.

This stack could be picked apart; there is probably a way to have this run for $0 as opposed to the $40 it’s cost so far (less than the cost of a consult) and this does not scale for a bigger operation. When I spend so much of time shooting for maximum scalability and future proofing, a project like this is a breath of fresh air and I know even just having this place on the web for Equine Alchemy is more than enough.

I couldn’t be prouder of the great work Maddy’s been doing with the business even in such early days and this project introduced a good set of tools to add to my repertoire.