#326 — End of 2024 Special

Dec 29, 2024

Another year has gone by, making it time for the Big Weeknote once again.

Work

I’m still working for GoCardless, but early this year I got promoted to Senior Developer.

This was very timely as it was approaching the two-year mark since I joined, and I was planning to start looking for a new (and more highly paid) job if a promotion didn’t seem imminent: so well done GoCardless, you kept hold of me! The next step up from Senior to Principal is a big one so I think I’ll be in this role for a while, but it’s fairly well paid (and better than the offers I get spammed with on Linkedin) so I’m happy for the time being.

I changed teams as part of that and I’m now on a much more merchant-facing team, whereas before I was largely working on the internals consumed by other teams. So there’s been an adjustment, but it’s nice to get to learn different areas of the codebase and different parts of the business.

I’m currently leading development of a long sought-after feature that we’re planning to launch in the near future (we’ve got some beta testers using it already). I won’t go into detail now, but it’s technically interesting and has involved a lot of fairly fundamental internal changes, breaking assumptions that have been in place from the beginning, which is a fun challenge to navigate.

Also this year the last project I led on my previous team got launched. Our internal payouts process used to run at 11:00 UK time (this isn’t a secret, it’s in the documentation and it’s also when merchants get the majority of their webhooks) but now it’s fully localised: meaning the pipeline can be scheduled in the local time of the destination currency. This means payouts can be submitted to the banks based on local scheme cutoff times (without needing to manually adjust the pipeline time as, say, Australian time deviates from UK time across the year) which means merchants receive their money a day faster, for some currencies.

This wasn’t just a matter of updating a crontab, there’s a lot of time and date logic in the pipeline and in related jobs that we had to review and change.

The rollout happened while I was on holiday in Japan so sadly I didn’t get to press the metaphorical big red button, but it went off without a hitch—Australian payouts are now localised to Sydney time—and the groundwork laid for ongoing improvements to payout speed.

Finance

Another year of gradual progress: consistency, that’s the key.

Though this has been an expensive year in some respects. I had my three-week holiday in Japan (which I largely saved up for in 2023, but then spent all the money this year), and more recently I’ve spent £1340 on dental care as I finally started seeing a dentist again after a gap of several years and had to have a bunch of work done.

Given those extra expenses, my FIRE number has gone up significantly this year, and my “runway”—how long it’d take to run out of money if I quit my job right now and just lived off the current cash and investments, at today’s market value, with no lifestyle changes at all—is still a little below 5 years, the same as this time last year.

But with next year’s forecasted expenses, those numbers improve significantly.

I plan to make two changes in 2025:

I used to have an emergency fund, but I ditched it in 2021. Part of the reason I got rid of it was so I could invest that cash, but my income now is such that building an emergency fund won’t prevent me from using up my whole ISA allowance, so saving that extra cash (rather than pumping it straight into a GIA or a SIPP) is an acceptable tradeoff.

Reading

This year I read 92 books, significantly up from last year, though a bunch of that was manga which is much quicker to get through. The number doesn’t really matter.

I’m also up to 998 books in bookdb, with 2 more arriving in the next few days! Wow, 1000 books! This year saw some expansion of my (still small) nonfiction section, as well as a lot of books (mostly fiction) being thrown out due to space considerations. I don’t much like getting rid of a book, but there were some that I was just never going to read, and space is at a premium.

This year I also got rid of the percentage-read stat from bookdb, as it made me feel bad about not reading reference books cover-to-cover (and hence being “unread” forever).

Here’s what I read:

My top three reads of 2024 are:

Tech

This year I finally gave up the pretence that I dual-boot azathoth, and removed the NixOS drive. I’m now fully on Windows 11 for desktop computing: much of what I do is done through a web browser (which is OS independent) or a terminal (which I get by SSHing into nyarlathotep or carcosa), and games and media make up a large portion of the rest, which just work better on Windows.

2024 was not the Year of the Linux Desktop.

Other than that:

But otherwise things are pretty much the same. NixOS is still great for servers (and for desktops too, it’s just more convenient to not dual-boot), Emacs is a great text editor, Firefox a great web browser, and Obsidian a great note-taking tool.

I might put a “uses” page up on barrucadu.co.uk…

No big plans for next year, though I’ve hit a point where I can’t upgrade Windows on azathoth any more due to the motherboard being too old (it doesn’t have a TPM), so I might rebuild azathoth but I’m not totally sure as it still works just fine.

Gaming

This year I fully drifted away from my Saturday group, a process which began last year. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a very long hiatus (caused by the primary GM having to leave the group) combined with a succession of games that just didn’t interest me.

Akkadian

This year I decided to take my casual interest in the Ancient Near East to the next level by learning Akkadian. I’ve been doing that for a few months now, and have translated the complaint tablet to Ea-Nāṣir and The Descent of Ištar into the Netherworld.

It’s a lot of fun, and very satisfying. I’m at the point now where—armed with a dictionary and grammar reference—I can translate reasonably well from transliterated texts. I’ve had less success at learning vocabulary: I tried to use Anki for about a month and a half but dropped it as I wasn’t retaining any of the verbs (though nouns and adjectives were fine).

Since Akkadian is a dead language, the ability to quickly recall vocabulary isn’t so important, though, as I won’t need to be able to speak it, to write it, or to read anything that needs an immediate translation. Still, it would be nice to be able to do that, if only in principle.

I haven’t tackled the script (cuneiform) yet. That’s going to be my next project (along with furthering my grammatical knowledge by continuing to work through the textbooks I have), and in 2025 I’d like to translate a long piece of cuneiform text.

Japan Trip

I spent just over two weeks from mid-April to early-May in Japan with a bunch of online friends from a small imageboard, none of whom I’d met in person before. I had a really great time!

I had direct flights there and back between Heathrow and Haneda, unlike last time I went to Japan to attend a small conference during my Ph.D (which didn’t give me much opportunity to look around), so these were the longest flights I’ve been on by far. Still, not so bad, I just kind of zoned out after a while and time ceased to exist.

We spent a few days in Tokyo while everyone recovered from jetlag, then a week in Osaka, and the final week back in Tokyo. I also spent a weekend meeting up with some other friends in Matsuyama.

While the language was obviously a difficulty, I was very impressed with how good Google Lens was at translating signs, menus, and any other written text I pointed it at. Sometimes it got things wrong, but it was close enough that I could get by.

I paused weeknotes during the trip, and wrote a single long weeknote with some summarising thoughts once I got home.

King James Programming

This year I resurrected King James Programming, a tumblr blog that posts once a day the curated output of a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I also set it up on the Fediverse.

I rewrote the generator code to make the output easier to visually scan for the crossover points where it switches from one corpus to the other, as those are where the fun bits are, but it’s still quite a lot of tedious work. So unless I am suddenly struck by a desire to do more, KJP will end on the 28th of February. I’ve picked out a quote that has a degree of finality to it to be the last one.

Miscellaneous

Another notable thing that happened this year was my first trip to A&E: I slipped and cut my left index finger badly in late November.

I’m pleased to say that while it’s still not 100% it’s healing quite well. There’s a faint scar and I very nearly have full movement back. The more concerning thing is the near total loss of feeling on the side of the cut, between the cut and the fingertip. That might just be gone forever, or it might come back in several months time. Impossible to say.

Be careful with knives.