I keep lots of lists, mostly due to my tendency to forget anything I haven't written down.

In my head, 2024 was a short year, in which little happened - other than me spending the first 9 months preparing for impending fatherhood, and then spending the final 3 months wholly consumed by it 👨🏻‍🍼

But when I gather my lists from the year, a different picture emerges, of a year packed with oodles of activities, side-projects & hobbies, and some very busy periods at work 👨🏻‍💼

For the record (i.e. my own faulty memory), what follows is my best effort at listing the notable events & activities from my 2024.

Personal:

Big stuff

• Became a father 👨🏻‍🍼
• Became a Danish citizen 🇩🇰♥️

Little stuff

• Traveled ✈️: Andorra 🏔️, Moldova 🍷 (least ✈️ travel since COVID)
• Completed the NYT crossword, without hints, every day on the day for all of February:
• Went to Copenhell 🤘, wrecking myself in ~20 mosh pits over 4 days 😵
• Took lots of trips to CPH for work & concerts 🚊
• Sold our diesel car (VW Polo) and leased¹ an electric car (VW ID.3)
• Regular DnD / RPG sessions with 2 long-running groups 🎲
• Summer "glamping" trip to the west coast of Denmark, where I learned that my preferred style of camping is indoors in a posh, well-equipped cabin, watching the Wimbledon + Euro finals 🎾⚽️ and occasionally enduring a short walk over to the spa 🧖🏻‍♂️

Professional:

Work/Projects

This year, as a tech PM / delivery lead, I delivered:

• A combined product & GenAI research pilot for a large Danish public infrastructure company.
• A Vision AI product for tracking plant biodiversity for another large Danish public infrastructure company.
• A mobile app with IoT tool integration to support safety-critical construction & service for a large Danish enterprise.
• New modules in a complex mission-critical data platform for a large Danish enterprise.

Additionally, I (re-)joined a startup product team to help out as a Scrum Master (and got to code a bit!), and got my hands on the Apple Vision Pro and assisted in a few customer demos.

Work/Leadership

Outside of my direct project work, I:

• Re-organized & ramped up our ~15-person 'delivery management' practice group.
• Acted as 'team lead' for 8 colleagues over the course of the year.
• Was active in my business unit leadership, running our weekly steering meetings & taking part in strategy discussions.
• Assisted in interviewing, hiring & (primarily) onboarding a slew of new colleagues, including 5 new Sr. PM's across our offices.
• Helped revamp our account management & strategy setup towards our largest customer.
• Took part in a cross-office guild for 'Agile Coaching', hosting a session myself on my experiences & lessons learned as an Agile Coach.
• Took part in a weekly cross-office peer-coaching group.

Workshops & Conferences Attended

• GOTO Aarhus in person.
• Emacs Conf 2024 online.
• Followed WWDC 2024 closely online.
• 1-day Masterclass on User Stories & Use Cases with Alistair Cockburn.
• 2-day AI Hackathon - with a co-worker, made a LLM-based tool to query a relational database in free/semantic text (i.e. "what customers should we increase our sales effort on next year?").

User Groups

• Happily taking part in Aarhus Ruby Group.
• Joining in Aarhus Clojure meetups, despite still falling short of converting over to Clojure myself.

Programming

As side projects, this year I made:

• An Azure Function that sends me a daily email with the top posts on Hacker News.
• A flashcard-based language learning app in Flutter.
• A Flutter app that shows an infinite-scroll feed with all the emails in my "Feeds" folder in Gmail.
• A watchOS app + Ruby service that relays images from the baby camera to my Apple Watch.
• An Azure Function + Apple Shortcuts STT/TTS setup that sends my questions/prompts to ChatGPT and then speaks the answer back to me, from my iPhone & Apple Watch.
• A web page + API to check whether King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have released new music today.
• A little Ruby terminal script that takes a prompt (e.g. 'how do I set a virtual environment in Python?'), sends it to the OpenAI API, and prints the result & copies it to my clipboard.
• A SwiftUI iOS/iPadOS app for my wife & I to quickly log grocery expenses into our family budget spreadsheet.

Then, I did some other nerdy stuff, including:

• Restarting this blog!
• Learning Emacs 💘
• Shelling out for a personal Apple Developer account 💸
• Falling back in love with Ruby, my very first programming language passion 🥰
• Getting a new Raspberry Pi 5, along with an AI module for it, and putzing around with local vision AI processing - though without any practical use cases coming out of it.

Consumption:

Movies

Close to 200 movies watched 😵‍💫 Can't imagine I'll top that ever again.

Highlights:

• David Lynch becoming my favorite director.
• Eraserhead affecting me in a way no other movie has, in perfectly capturing & expressing the anxieties & horrors of new fatherhood.
• Watching all of Satoshi Kon's (tragically few) masterpieces for the first time.

Shortlist of favorites from 2024, seen in the theater:

1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (3 times)
2. Dune: Part Two (twice)
3. Conclave

(This list might just reflect how few movies (6?) I've been able to see in the theater this year 😝)

Books

Ca. 6000 pages read (4-year low 🤕 - 2023/10k, 2022/8k)

Books finished:

• Wheel of Time series, read books 1-5 and now mid-way through book 6.
• Stormlight Archive 5: Wind and Truth, now ca. 450 pages in.
• Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (tough read, expects the reader has a firm grounding in French history, which I most certainly don't/didn't!).
• Masters of Doom (must read for gaming history enthusiasts & software nerds).
• The Inmates are Running the Asylum.
• Unifying User Stories, Use Cases, Story Maps: the power of verbs.

Not including the tall stack of books I picked up, didn't finish, and left aside for 2025 🙃

Music:

Still spent most of the year stuck in the 1970s, but for new music, these stick out the most:

1. Chappell Roan:² The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
2. Beyonce: Cowboy Carter
3. St Vincent: All Born Screaming
4. Kim Deal: Nobody Loves You More
5. Yannis & the Yaw:³ Lagos Paris London

TV

Only saw Twin Peaks. But what a precious gem the first season is! And the third season is absolutely mind-melting in the best way possible 🤯

Games

Big dropoff in my gaming this year. Lots of interesting games out there, just not enough time / will.

• Stardew Valley coop, until my then-pregnant wife became too nauseated to game ☹️
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree (Elden Ring ~=90% of my gaming this year)
• Zelda: BotW (finally got to this masterpiece)

Podcasts

• Blank Check: Director filmographies. I've now listened to every one of their 500+ episodes, at ~2-3hrs each. 😵‍💫.
• Ezra Klein Show: Stellar reporting this year on the issues I've cared about most: AI, politics+policy in America, the 2024 presidential election, the war in Ukraine, and of course the war(s) in Israel/Palestine. Very highly recommended!