Bryan
Anthonio

2024: My Year in Review

Reviewing my highlights from 2024 and plans for 2025.

Headshot of Bryan Anthonio
Bryan Anthonio
A surfer performs an aerial maneuver above a breaking wave during sunset, creating a dramatic spray of water against a dusky ocean backdrop.
A Salt Water Cloak.

2024 was full of significant milestones–from proposing to my partner to establishing myself as a full-stack developer, among other achievements. Let’s unpack it all.

Contents

My Previous Yearly Reviews

Here are previous yearly reviews that I’ve written:

3 Key Lessons I Learned

Simplicity is key in problem-solving. When approaching complex problems it’s best to find the simplest solution first before adding complexity. A simple solution is often easier to understand, implement, and maintain.

Sleep is the ultimate productivity hack. I finally tamed my insomnia and got 7+ hours of sleep a night more consistently. With good sleep I feel much more creative and inspired.

Every pursuit comes at the expense of another. Instead of chasing every interesting path like learning Rust, I learned to ask whether each opportunity truly aligned with my core goals. By forgoing non-essential projects, I could focus deeply on what mattered most to me. Through this, I discovered that doing less, paradoxically, enabled me to achieve more.

Reflecting on My Goals for 2024

I set goals for 2024 in my previous yearly review. Here’s a recap of my progress.

Learn About AI & Computing

I accomplished part of this goal by completing the first part of the NAND2Tetris course. This course gave me a lot of insight regarding the hardware components that make modern computers work.

I considered learning more about LLM technologies. To that end, I purchased this book by Sebastian Raschka to learn how to build an LLM from scratch and built a weather chatbot to learn about agents.

But, my interests eventually shifted onto other topics such as distributed systems. I may revisit this goal sometime in the future.

Develop UI Design Expertise

I’m very proud to say that I accomplished this goal by finishing 4 out of 7 modules of the Learn UI Design course! I’ve gotten much more confident in my UI design skills since then. I even redesigned my website to apply what I learned.

Read 12+ books.

I read 11 books this year:

Ship 3 Projects

My goal for this was to share 3 small projects on Github that I worked on:

These are all toy projects I built to achieve my learning goals.

Publish 12+ blog posts.

I only published 8 blog posts this year. Though I didn’t achieve my goal it may be best to focus on quality rather than quantity. I enjoy writing about technical topics the most so I’ll focus more on that in the coming year.

Gain Conversational Fluency in Spanish

I’ve made this my goal for two years in a row but I’ve yet to make progress on this. Learning a new language requires consistent effort which I haven’t made time for.

Other Highlights

I Got Engaged!

I finally got down on one knee and proposed to my partner! We’re now looking forward to getting married in 2025.

We Visited Two New Destinations

  • Italian Dolomites: We explored the Dolomites shortly before summer started. Despite the spotty weather, the views were incredible! I look forward to revisiting this place in the future.
  • Kauai: We visited Kauai over Thanksgiving break. We’ve always enjoyed visiting Hawaii once each year and this trip didn’t disappoint!
The Seceda ridgeline.
Our view of the Seceda ridgeline.
Aerial view of Kauai's lush, emerald-green mountain ridges with dramatic folded valleys and a distant waterfall visible in the background.
One of my favorite views from Kauai.

Two Of My Blog Posts Went Viral

My blog posts on Elixir REST APIs and Pydantic dictionary types went viral this year. This came as a surprise to me because I wrote these mostly for my future self. I’m glad others found them useful.

According to my website analytic these two posts were viewed more than 3,000 times combined in the last 12 months. In examining this, I noticed that the blog post on Pydantic dictionary types was shared broadly on various newsletters, such as Pycoder’s Weekly #652. Otherwise, the vast majority of traffic has come from organic Google searches.

Finished One Year as a Software Developer

This was my first full year working as a professional software developer!

Before this current stint, I worked as a data scientist for 2 years which wasn’t the best fit for my interests. I’m much more content with my current role as a full-stack developer and the technical challenges I get to work on.

Goals for 2025

Focusing on simplicity, I’ve streamlined my goals for the coming year.

Improve My Fitness

I’d like to be more consistent about working out at the gym. Here are my strength training goals (3 rep maxes):

  • Squat – 250 lbs
  • Bench Press – 180 lbs
  • Overhead Press – 125 lbs
  • Deadlifts – 300 lbs

I’m going to work on my cardiovascular fitness as well. Since I enjoy running I’m going to use the Nike Running App to manage my workouts. These are my goals:

  • Run a mile in 7 minutes
  • Run a 10K

I want to take a swim class to improve my breathing technique for freestyle swimming. I’d like to incorporate swimming in my exercise routine.

Learn About Distributed Systems

I been doing more and more backend development at work these days. I’d like to learn more about distributed systems to understand how to scale up web applications to support more users.

I’m aiming to write more about my learnings in future blog posts. I’ve gotten started on this in some of my recent posts regarding Redis and Celery.

Finish Learn UI Design Course

I’m planning to finish the remaining 3 modules that I have left in this course.

Network with Other Software Developers

I’d like more opportunities to learn from other software developers. I’m aiming to attend one regular meetup each month. I’ve also been interacting more with the web development community on Bluesky.

Read 12 Books

While I enjoy reading sci-fi, I’m looking to read more books of other genres in 2025. For instance, I’ve heard a lot of good things about Brandon Sanderson’s novels.