Looking Back at 2024

Same ritual as last year; I look back at 2024 and reflect on the things that kept me busy over the course of the year.

personal year-in-review

Let’s continue last year’s tradition and look back at my personal highlights of 2024. I’m looking back at a year that was unusually busy and intense but full of blissful moments, meaningful connections, healthy change and new challenges. Luckily I had some generous vacation time, allowing me to catch a breath and making sure I don’t drown in the chaos.

the northern lights In October ‘24 I caught these stunning northern lights in our neighborhood on a late walk home.

Once more, this post is long. I didn’t bother cutting it short as this is my chance to self-reflect and tell a story. Here’s a handy table of contents if you want to skip some of the boring sections. I won’t notice.

Work

My professional life saw a lot of changes in 2024. At the beginning of the year I was a Principal Software Engineer at Stack Overflow and worked on strategic and longer-term architecture topics that impacted the entire engineering organization at Stack. I worked on topics like moving out of our data center, establishing a multi-cloud strategy, moving away from an aging monolithic application architecture towards a modular monolith, and enabling teams to build, maintain, and operate microservices on their own. I ran our architecture guild and tried to foster a culture where all engineering teams can have more autonomy and ownership over the software they’re building. It was an interesting role that allowed me to do a lot of research, spike solutions, work on the longer-term strategy of our engineering department, collaborate closely with our engineering managers and our CTO and learn a lot about running a healthy engineering organization. I learned a ton in this role and loved the autonomy I had.

On good days I could really see how the things I did had a fundamental impact on the entire engineering organization. On bad days, however, I felt out of touch with the rest of our engineers. Focusing on longer-term strategy, fundamental research and leadership left me longing for more direct impact. I couldn’t help but feel that a lot of the work I was doing was writing documents and proposals that sounded good on paper but didn’t necessarily translate into action. I was longing for more direct impact, longing for the days where I was hands-on as a software developer, working closely with other engineers, building cool stuff, shipping it to production and seeing how people out there start using the things we designed and built.

In May I took 5 weeks off from work. Stack Overflow has this amazing perk where you get 4 weeks of sabbatical leave once you’ve been with the company for 5 years. Having hit my 5 years earlier in 2024, I decided to take some time off to recharge and reflect on where I want to be in my career. My sabbatical gave me time to unwind, read, work on pet projects (that’s where I built Root Loops) and reflect. We saw some early signs of summer in May which allowed me to lounge in the hammock in the backyard quite extensively - and Lenny was in for the ride, too.

Lenny lounging in a hammock

My time off helped me recharge, get more clarity on where I was and what I wanted from my professional life. Taking some time to think made me realize how I had grown increasingly frustrated about my job, my lack of skin in the game and how I had become too comfortable in my position without growing as much as I’d wanted. This frustration, I realized, started bleeding into my private life more and more and I needed that to stop. It became more and more clear to me that I wanted to be more hands-on again. Strategic and foundational work is nice, and I appreciated everything I learned about running an engineering organization, but I felt that I was getting way too comfortable, staying too far away from the gnarly challenges, the tough problems. I shared my thoughts with my boss, our CTO, and we talked extensively about what we could do. I am grateful for how well my boss handled this situation. He helped me think through the options we had at Stack and together we tried to find ways to shape my role into something new that better met what I was looking for. Unfortunately, none of the options we had at the time were particularly compelling to me at that point. I sensed that it wasn’t because these weren’t interesting problems to solve, but rather that somewhere deep down I had already come to the conclusion that it was time for me to move on from Stack Overflow after 5 great years with the company (and to be candid, the previous year’s layoffs and ongoing focus on AI probably didn’t help keeping me engaged)

In July, I handed in my resignation.

Finding a new job after being a Principal Engineer was a little odd. There’s this natural notion that your career should have a steady progression. So being a “Principal Engineer” in my previous job made me look for “Principal Engineer” or comparable positions at other places. Thing is: there just aren’t many Principal-level positions out there. For a good reason, there are only so many very senior engineers you need at your company. I’m a generalist, I’m an experienced software developer and I’m equally experienced as a technical leader. So after looking for the next step up unsuccessfully for a bit, I started relaxing my criteria a bit. I started looking for engineering management positions, senior software developer positions, VP of Engineering positions, and similar. It helped me a lot to reject the idea that there’s got to be some kind of “progression”, that I have to “climb to the next level” with my next job. Jobs and companies are way too different, any sense of “progression” is made up anyways, and the work I’m doing matters so much more than the title I’ve got.

I found a new job at Gigs, a startup in the telecommunications space. It’s a fun place and a young company, and with that comes a healthy amount of chaos. Joining an earlier-stage company felt refreshing to me. There are a lot of problems to solve and I can apply a lot of my previous experience in a new context. I was anxious about starting over again and joining a new place. I knew that this meant I could be more hands on and step out of my comfort zone again, which was exactly what I was looking for after getting a little too cozy at Stack. But with every new start you risk joining a place that just isn’t the right fit for you. Luckily, Gigs turned out to be full of genuinely lovely people with an exciting amount of gnarly challenges. I joined Gigs as a Software Engineer which forced me to pick up Ruby, Rails, and Go quickly. I was thrilled to be hands-on again, to build and ship and deploy and operate and tweak and fix and observe. However, after about 8 weeks an opportunity came up to step into an Engineering Management position, leading one of our teams and slowly working myself into more cross-cutting leadership efforts. As much as I was thrilled to be back in the bits and bytes and get my hands dirty with Rails and some Go, I could sense that I’d have a bigger impact walking in engineering leadership shoes once again. So after a brief period of being hands-on again, it seems like I’m once again “post technical” and in the engineering leadership saddle, but being in a young and vibrant company this time feels a little different than it felt earlier in 2024. Let’s hope that this excitement carries over way into 2025 and beyond.

Leisure

With 5 weeks of vacation (the Stack Overflow sabbatical) at my disposal in May, I found myself in the wonderful position where I had to think about how to make the best use of my time. I planned my sabbatical carefully and wanted to make sure I don’t just spend all my time sitting in front of a computer — after all that’s what I do when I’m not on vacation, so what’s the point? I came up with a list of things I wanted to do and things I had been putting out for too long and I made sure that this list included quality time with family and friends, learning new things, finishing up some projects I wanted to finish, and doing things that would pay off in the future. Not all of these things fit into the 5 weeks of my sabbatical and kept me busy throughout the remainder of the year instead. My time outside of work has been unusually busy and productive this year. Sometimes I got to do fun things, often I got to deal with things that I had put off for too long because they suck, but I’m grateful and happy I took the time to get them done.

Gardening & Landscaping

My wife and I spent a ton of time getting our garden back in shape. We bought a house about 5 years ago, and with that house we bought a gorgeous but quite labor-intense garden surrounding our home. We spent the first few years in maintenance mode, not making too many changes and learning how nature changes throughout the seasons here. After a few years, however, we started noticing things we needed to take care of. Trees that had grown too large, shrubs that were dead or sick and had to be taken out, hedges that needed to be cut back generously, small landscaping projects we wanted to do.

Hydrangea plants in our garden Hydrangea in our garden.

We started the year cutting down an old cherry tree that had grown too large close to our garage, causing problems with the drain and foundations of the building. I hesitated to cut down that tree as it was a beautiful tree bearing fruit every summer, but we couldn’t ignore the problems it caused and would cause further down the road if we didn’t act. Cutting down this tree also cleared up some space for us to install a good amount of solar panels on our garage that helped reduce our energy bill significantly.

We spend a ton of time trimming, cutting, and removing old shrubs and plants, making space for the healthier plants in our garden to grow and thrive. While we had been hesitant doing too radical cuts in the first few years we learned the lesson that a healthy garden needs generous tending and care every now and then, and most (if not all) the plants we cut back drastically came back much better than before.

We started the biggest project of the year in August when we decided to redo an earth wall on the west side of our house. We ripped out a ton of ivy, dead shrubs, and put together five tonnes of sandstone to create a gorgeous structure supporting the wall. I’m really proud of the result and I’m sure this structure will continue to look gorgeous for decades to come.

A sandstone wall we put together in late summer A small section of the sandstone wall we put together in late summer.

Camping

Luckily there’s been time I did not spend with landscaping and yard work. In July I went camping with my friends. Unfortunately we got soaked badly as it was pouring most of the weekend, but we made the best of the time we got together and had a ton of fun, a bonfire, drinks, good food, and some time out in nature.

Rain

Of course it’s nicer to spend time in nature when the weather is nice but even with bad weather I genuinely love the annual camping weekend we do. It’s a great way to escape from civilization, be outside, and completely disconnect for a short time.

My Moped

I only managed to take a single ride with my moped, an 1959 (I believe, it’s hard to tell precisely) NSU Quickly I restored a few years ago, this year. The trip ended with the chain coming off, which is likely caused by the rear wheel not being in the proper position after I reassembled it last year, giving the chain too much slack. I fixed it and continued my ride with greasy fingers, but it was a great reminder that I really need to finish my moped restoration project properly soon.

An NSU Quickly moped in green standing on a country lane

The restoration of my NSU Quickly isn’t finished yet. I redid the fuel tank, the carburetor, pedals, wheels, tires, speedometer and breaks so far. The most obvious thing that’s still lacking is the frame and paint. I’ve been planning to take it to a shop and get it sandblasted and painted properly but in order to do so I’ve got to disassemble the entire thing and I’ve been putting that off for a while now since it’s just going to be so much work. Another thing on my list is to fix the clutch and maybe give the transmission a do-over. Maybe 2025 will be the year, who knows.

Doppelkopf

Of course this year also saw a healthy dose of playing Doppelkopf with my friends. We’re playing once a month at a local pub. It’s always good fun and a great way to meet my buddies, have a few beers, talk shit and have a good time.

A hand of cards Guess who played a Damensolo with this hand.

I’ve been getting better at Doppelkopf in recent years but so have my buddies. I keep track of every game and at the end of a year we get together and figure out who played best and scored the most points throughout a year. I haven’t evaluated 2024 just yet, but it looks like it won’t be me getting a trophy this year. Damn.

Learning

I invested some time in 2024 to learn a few new things. Besides the weird and fuzzy stuff you learn about life and being a human being, I picked up a few new tools and frameworks and got a better understanding of things I picked up before.

Some of the things I looked into in 2024 are:

Pet Projects

In 2024 I finally managed to design, build, and ship an idea that has been sitting in the back of my mind for a few years. During my sabbatical, I spent a wild amount of time on designing and building Root Loops, a tool to generate your own terminal color schemes, and I had a blast doing so.

Root Loops

Building something quirky with a rather unique design was a fun experience and one of the things that made me realize how much I missed building and shipping something. I wrote a blog post to capture what I’d learned about color theory and designing terminal color schemes, and that one got somewhat popular. I spend some time here and there extending Root Loops over the course of the year, adding more and more exporters for various terminals and command line tools, and I’ll continue to add more further down the road. I built Root Loops with SvelteKit and it’s been a great choice for what’s mostly a single page application and some static content.

Root Loops gathered some traction and got picked up by a few podcasts, newsletters, and blogs, which was great to see. There have been a few active contributions to the GitHub repository and I’m eager to see what else is coming in the future.

Besides Root Loops, I built a silly Air Horn app for funsies (see also this blog post).

Last year, I rebuilt this very website (hamvocke.com, that is) and wanted to write a bit more than before. With 8 blog posts (including this one) and a few updates to my /now page published in 2024, some of them silly and mundane, some profound, some very personal, I like to think that was a success.

Health & Exercise

2024 was a good year for exercising and overall health. In January, two of my friends and I signed up for a local 5k race. I’m not much of a runner but I know I’m capable of running 5k without a lot of trouble. Unlike my friends, however, I’m not really fast. We turned this into a small competition which motivated me to actually set aside some time early this year to train for the 5k race, work on my cardio, endurance, and speed. During my (fairly infrequent) training sessions I managed to finish my 5k in about 25 minutes (most often I took Lenny with me on my runs which messes with the time a little as he needs occasional breaks to sniff and pee — but honestly, I didn’t mind the breaks either). I finished the actual race in 24:04, a pace I’m really happy with.

Most of my exercise revolves around powerlifting style training. I’m fortunate to have a well equipped home gym that allows me to train pretty much whenever I can find the time. I focused on building out my strength over the last few years. The longer I’m doing this and the older I get, the harder it becomes to increase my peak strength, and I got somewhat tired of grinding out heavy sets of the same exercises (Squats, Bench Press, Deadlifts, Overhead Press) over and over again. I decided to switch things up a bit in 2024. First, I wanted to cut my weight back a little more without losing much of my strength. Second, I wanted to try new things that are still strength-related but outside of classic powerlifting. Over summer, I ran Brian Alsruhe’s “Every Day Carry” program. It’s a program that borrows concepts from powerlifting and strongman sports, incorporates daily heavy carries using sandbags and farmer’s walks implement, and kicks your butt with a ton of giant sets that leave you gasping for air. I had a ton of fun playing around with new exercises and enjoyed the carrying part much more than I expected. The giant sets and strict timing of the program massively helped me improve my conditioning. My top strength didn’t change much (if at all) over the course of the year but I can tell how I’m coming out of 2024 with much better conditioning and a better base strength, making me feel more secure and confident at sub-max attempts of my main lifts. I’m considering running Every Day Carry again in 2025.

Overall, I worked out on 231 days in 2024, which is the highest amount of workouts I’ve ever tracked in a given year. I mostly train in my garage gym and my backyard (for carries, sandbag sessions and farmer’s walks) - but this year I finally managed to set foot into a real gym for the first time in years. When I visited Gigs’ office in Berlin in late fall, a coworker took me to Berlin Strength and I had a ton of fun (ha!) lifting with some like-minded people around me.

Ham performing a deadlift at Berlin Strength Deadlifting in chicken socks at Berlin Strength

In 2024 I kept my bodyweight in check and managed to cut back a little bit. I’m considering gaining some weight deliberately next year to see if that helps me with improving my top strength and build some more muscle, but as someone who used to be obese earlier in his life this is a decision that doesn’t come easily.

This year I planned to be more mindful around my alcohol consumption. I like having a few beers in a social setting but I’m not one to ever drink alone or outside of a social gathering. Looking back at 2024, I think I managed to do better than in 2023 by being better at moderation, having fewer drinks in social settings, and abstaining from drinking for weeks on end multiple times this year.

Travel

I left the country twice this year. My family and I traveled to Athens, Greece in March and had a great time visiting old sites and immersing ourselves in history for a few days.

In October, I went to Portugal with my new company. As a remote-friendly company, we get together in person twice a year, and Portugal was my first chance to meet everyone in person. We had a great time socializing, strategizing, getting everyone aligned, and checking out the impressive waves of Nazaré. It’s a privilege to be able to see such beautiful corners of the world as part of my work and I’m grateful I got a chance to visit Portugal this year.

The beach of Nazaré, Portugal as seen from the light house

Apart from these two trips, I went to Berlin twice this year to meet some of my new coworkers. I tried to go three times in total, but the first time ended with me crashing my car in a gnarly accident that shook me up for quite a while. Luckily nobody got harmed in the accident and my insurance company helped me take care of the damage.

Music

There’s one musical highlight that stands out for me in 2024 without any doubt. It’s Bilmuri.

I discovered this weird, eclectic, and ridiculously catchy mix of country, pop and metalcore breakdowns in early 2024 and couldn’t get enough of it for the remainder of the year.

Other highlights of 2024 include:

Books

If I tracked everything correctly, I read and finished 12 books in 2024. This year I had quite a few very mediocre and underwhelming ones - I don’t know if this is me getting more critical or just bad luck.

Here’s what I read, in rough chronological order.

Cooking

I enjoy cooking, and I did a few noteworthy cooks in 2024.

Overall, I continued diving into the world of home-made pizza. I made a few nice Neapolitan-style pizzas that turned out to be my best ones so far. I’m slowly getting better at creating evenly round shapes, getting the char on point (I still burn them sometimes for sure) and making the dough rise to a nice crisp and airy goodness.

Neapolitan-style Pizza A classic Neapolitan-style pizza with prosciutto and some balsamic vinegar.

Neapolitan-style Pizza A pistachio cream base with mortadella (and some burrata I added after taking this picture).

Neapolitan-style Pizza Mozzarella, burrata, pickled red onions.

My wife gifted me “Perfect Pan Pizza” by Peter Reinhart for my birthday in March, and that book inspired us to experiment quite a bit with Dertroit-style pan pizza and Focaccia. Focaccia has become a staple for barbecues and get-togethers with friends and neighbors that I really enjoyed preparing and bringing for larger crowds of people.

Focaccia with mortadella and pistachio cream and burrata Focaccia with mortadella, pistachio cream and burrata (can you tell that this combination has become a recurring theme?)

Outside of Pizza, I fired up the old smoker a few times this year. We had friends over for some nice Pastrami using beef brisket. We served it on home-made sandwiches and some rye bread we got from a local bakery, together with pickled gherkins and mustard. I also smoked some trout and pulled pork this year, but didn’t take good pictures.

Pastrami on the smoker, Lenny in the background Pastrami on my smoker, Lenny in the background

And lastly, following my yearly tradition I started curing ham earlier this week, that’s going to be ready for cold-smoking in about 3 weeks. I chose lean cuts this time to switch things up from last years rather fatty hams. My 2023/2024 batch turned out great and a lot of my friends enjoyed their share. I hope this year’s batch will be equally well received.

Ham on a wooden plate Some of my 2023/2024 ham

Here’s to a great 2025!

Once more I’m grateful that I can look back at a year full of positive change, health, and time spent with loved ones.

I know that things often seem grim and it’s easy to lose any sense of optimism if you follow the news. Don’t let the doom and gloom of our daily lives take away from the beauty, kindness, and opportunities you can find out there every day. I hope you all have an amazing year 2025 and get a chance to enjoy many great moments, health, fun, and time spent with the people you love.

Stay awesome and take care!